About Time
by DoraMouse
Summary: Set in the early Mirai Timeline. However Trunks is not the star and this is not a dark-angst fic. If I could summarize this story in a couple lines then it wouldn't be worth your time to read. Give it a chance to make sense and it will. 16 parts. Complete
1.

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 1**

767 A.D.

Smoke blotted out the stars and smeared across the horizon. Against the darkness of the night sky the rising plumes of clouds resembled nothing so much as a can of spilt gray paint that was, in defiance of physics, dripping upward through numerous small streams. Far beneath the haze, close to the ground, a dull orange trail of energy hung in the air. It was a broken trail that tapered off in places before starting up again with the orange molecules sometimes flashing gold or white before fading out completely.

Directly under the narrow wave of fading light, the ground held a broken trail of its own. Marked in red.

Gohan had taken a beating. He was still alive though - which was considerably more than could be said for anyone else that had been in the area. Already Gohans mind was blocking out the more traumatic scenes that he had witnessed earlier today.

Among the few things that the ten year old could remember clearly about the bloody massacre was the unnatural way that the sky had kept changing color, as if a nice harmless fireworks display was taking place. Except that everyone had been running away from the show and there had been a pair of nearly identical smirking figures hovering above the hysterical crowds.

There was a significant gap in his memory right then. But after the gap, Gohan remembered flying away from the place. He remembered feeling lost in more than the directional sense. What he didn't remember was the noise. The entire memory replayed in silence and slow-motion, becoming distorted and vague as if it had only been a dream. A dream...

Sleep. Gohan hovered, yawning. He tried to snap out of the fog that was clouding his mind - unaware that the fog was the direct result of his nervous system shutting down to prevent him from feeling any real pain. Some tiny part of Gohans mind was conscious of the fact that he was bleeding to death and urged him to keep flying in search of help. Gohan ignored that part. He was too weary to continue. His body was one giant ache and he didn't fully understand why since in the darkness he couldn't see his own injuries. And he was beyond feeling them.

Taking a break just seemed sensible. Yawning again, Gohan decided that he would rest for a little while and sort everything out later. He thought that maybe getting some rest would help clear his mind. Then he'd at least be able to figure out where he was and where he should be going.

The ground wasn't comfortable. Yet as soon as Gohan had curled up there, he dozed off. His last firm thought before his brain surrendered to the overwhelming urge to sleep was that he knew where he couldn't go. He couldn't go home.

* * *

"GOHAN!" ChiChi nearly choked her son as she engulfed him in a fierce hug, tears of relief running down her face. "I was so worried!"

While ChiChi continued her somewhat garbled motherly rant with comments like "Are you okay?" and "Don't you EVER do that again!", Gohan realized that this wasn't a dream. He was fully awake. Half laying across the front step of his own house.

_How the heck?_

Instinctively Gohan knew that he'd fallen asleep somewhere else. Even if he hadn't been able to see where he'd been at the time, it couldn't have been his own house. Could it? Suddenly Gohan wasn't entirely sure that he would have recognized his home. Which disturbed him almost as much as the realization that his judgement had probably been impaired by the sheer amount of pain that he'd been in.

A quick self-inspection showed that his clothes were still torn and that he was still covered in splotches of blood which his mother was hastily wiping away with a tissue while lecturing him about being more careful. But the blood that covered him now was old and had dried out, he wasn't bleeding anymore. He wasn't even scratched or bruised or tired. Gohan blinked. _Senzu._ It had to be. _So someone found me and..._

In the space of a few seconds, every emotion known to man rushed through Gohans system with such speed and intensity that it left him feeling dizzy. Nevertheless he abruptly scrambled to his feet, eyes widening as the implications struck. Someone had found him! Someone that knew about senzu beans. Someone that must have been able to track his ki. Someone that knew where he lived and that had left him on the doorstep of his house.

The faintest of smiles managed to work its way into the features of the boy who had, not so long ago, felt that he would never be able to smile again. _Someone else is alive!_ Gohan turned to his mother and gripped her shoulders. "Who left me here?"

Gohan wasn't sure which warriors name he was hoping to hear the most but he would have traded a decent portion of his life to hear a group of names.

ChiChi shook her head sadly and Gohans heart sank into his toes. "I wish I knew." ChiChi sighed the weary sigh of someone who hadn't slept well for the past several years. "They didn't leave a note or anything - they just left you here. And I didn't even realize you were here until I had to get some fresh air..."

That's right. She'd been hiding in the basement, as per Gohans own suggestion. The basement was both reinforced and concealed. Thus - in theory - if anything either came into the house or blew the house away, the basement should remain undisturbed.

ChiChi hugged her son, leaning against him for support. "I was so afraid that you wouldn't come back."

"I'm back." Gohan said the words in a comforting tone without putting much commitment into them. Although he was glad to be home, he didn't know how long he'd stay.

Closing his eyes, Gohan turned his attention to the world of energy. Reflexively searching for the ki signatures of his fellow warriors. Shuddering each time he failed to locate one. _Maybe they've just powered down so much that..._ Gohan let the idea trail off unfinished. Much as he would have liked to deny what he knew, he couldn't. His memory was much sharper now. He could remember them dying. The memories were still somewhat fuzzy and replayed without sound but they were enough. More than enough.

There hadn't been any warning. Everyone had their own lives and had been attending to their own routines when the androids had first struck. So the warriors hadn't all found out at once and as a result, they hadn't reached the battlefield together either. Vegeta had probably confronted the androids first. By the time that Gohan had learned of the robotic menaces, the Saiyan Prince was already dead. Most of the Earths defending warriors had died one at a time while simply trying to reach each other. Gohan knew as much even without having seen all the battles. He'd felt each of their kis flare, slip and then fade. Alone. Vegeta, Krillen, Yamucha, Tenshinhan, Yajirobe, Piccolo...

Which left... Gohan tried to figure out who that left but now his thoughts refused to come as clearly as the memories. He was able to recall, in painful detail, how the former city had looked when he'd flown over it. The crumpled bodies scattered in the street... Gohans features lost all of their color. He could almost smell the grisly scene as it replayed in his mind and that was enough to make him want to retch.

"Come in, lets get you warmed up." ChiChi tugged him indoors by an elbow. "You'll catch your death if you go about sleeping on doorsteps."

Gohan followed her without any comment. He was caught up in his own thoughts. Or rather, thought. Just one that repeated itself over and over because it was a question that he couldn't answer. _Why should I get to go home when they don't?_

He'd always cared for his mother - and even moreso since his fathers death last year - but at the moment all Gohan could think was that he didn't deserve to be here. It wasn't right. Him, a warrior that had a slight chance of defending himself. Hiding in a safe place with family when there were Kami-only-knew how many helpless refugees out there who'd lost everything they owned and people they cared about and...

_... Oh Kami,_ inwardly Gohan swore, _Kami!_

If Piccolo was dead then god was dead too. For some reason that hadn't registered before. Gohan had been more aware of the loss of the dragonballs when his mentor had passed. He rationalized that this was because he knew more about the dragonballs than he did about Kami. Which didn't make him feel any better about Kami being dead.

Although, Kami had been dead before. The barest outlines of a plan took shape in Gohans mind. If he could just find a spaceship somewhere... _Not likely._ Gohan admitted to himself as he headed towards his room, nodding at his mothers suggestion that he should get some clean clothes on.

To the best of Gohans knowledge, Capsule Corp had only ever built one spacecraft. Oh sure - they'd modified the ship that Kami had originally come to Earth in and had studied the ship that Raditz had used but those didn't count. Capsule Corp hadn't built those. The one spaceship they'd built had been the one that Goku... _Dad_... had used to reach the original Planet Namek. And _that_ particular spaceship had been destroyed back when Planet Namek had blown up. Capsule Corp hadn't built any more spacecraft after that since the craft weren't profitable investments. Capsule Corp was a company after all, complete with bills to pay. Companies couldn't afford to build things that the general public couldn't afford to buy.

So as far as Gohan knew, there weren't any spacecraft on Earth. And even if by some weird miracle he did find a spaceship that he would be able to use... Gohan doubted that anyone would know what the coordinates for New Planet Namek were.

Curtains flapped. One of the windows in his room was open. Idly Gohan traced the window frame with his fingers. He'd thrown the window open yesterday, when he'd first sensed Vegeta dying. He'd shouted a warning to his mother before flying off. The memory of his own departure seemed surreal now. It was strange to think of how normal yesterday had been before everything had gone catastrophically wrong.

The unfinished homework laying on his desk was another reminder. Trigonometry seemed so trivial now. Homework in general seemed trivial. Gohan felt that he probably wouldn't ever go back to school because there probably wouldn't be any school to go back to. He spent a moment full of regret. He was disappointed to think that he'd never earn a high school degree, he'd always been proud of his education. Gohan missed the peaceful routines of school already. It had been nice to have an unexpected pop quiz in history class be his biggest concern in life. It had been nice not to have to worry about saving the world.

_Again._ Gohan was ten years old but as the heavy burden of the world sank onto his shoulders, he felt infinitely older. It didn't matter that he'd been involved in saving the world since the age of four - more than half his life - the burden wasn't something that he could ever really get used to. He'd never felt comfortable with it. Being a hero wasn't exactly something he'd chosen to do. The career had just sort of chosen him. Gohan wouldn't have minded being an ordinary kid but destiny seemed to have other expectations of him.

What it boiled down to was that out there, beyond his window, the planet was full of creatures who were weaker than him. And that simple fact made Gohan feel responsible for all of them. Protective of them. Gohan wondered if his father had ever felt this way.

Then the haunting question came back, this time accompanied by equally haunting fragments of memory that flashed through his brain. _Why should I get to go home when they don't?_

He couldn't stay home. Innocents were dying out there. The issue was unresolved and even if he wasn't sure how, he had to solve it. Or at least try to solve it. For his own peace of mind if not for the welfare of the world. Gohan didn't know what exactly he could do to defeat the androids but he felt that if he didn't do something then he was part of the problem.

As soon as he had changed clothes, Gohan slipped out through the window and flew off. It just wouldn't be right to make the world wait.

He'd only flown a few yards from his house when he was knocked out of the sky. With a bone-jarring thud Gohan landed flat on his back and watched the energy shield that he'd flown into glow for a few moments in the place where he'd impacted it. The energy made a low hissing sound as it resumed being totally invisible.

_Sorry._ A soft voice spoke clearly in Gohans mind. _But telekinesis doesn't work very well on anything moving of its own power._

Gohan recognized the voice for a full five minutes before he could pin a name to it. _Ko... Kao... Gah! You know what I mean!_

The owner of the telepathic voice winced at the mangling of his name. _Chaozu._ He corrected with a sigh. _It's all right. Last time you saw me you were what - six?_

_Seems like eons ago._ Gohan agreed as he sat up and glanced around. _Hey... Uhm... Where are you anyway? And... Err..._ Gohan tried to think of a nice way to ask a question that was bound to sound unpleasant. _Uhm..._

"And why am I still alive?" This time the soft voice wasn't telepathic. Gohan was so startled that he jumped ten feet in the air and remained there, hovering. Chaozu seemed accustomed to getting this kind of reaction.

"How did you...?"

"I've been a politician before. Wasn't too bad of a job while it lasted." Chaozu shrugged absently, as if that remark alone should be able to explain his unique ability to sneak up on people. Nevermind that his best friend had been an assassin and that he was one of the most adept psychics on the planet. "As to why I'm alive - well, I try to stay out of fights that I know I can't win. Besides," And here something frightfully alert darted across the depths of Chaozus dark oval eyes, "it wasn't my time."

At this point Gohan concluded that a two foot tall martial arts master with a political history and skin white enough to make vampires jealous was nothing to be afraid of. What was truly scary was the way that Chaozu seemed to know precisely what he was talking about.

Which, of course, he did.

In a perfectly neutral voice Chaozu continued. "And about why I didn't warn everyone in advance..."

_I didn't ask that..._ Gohan thought.

_You were about to._ Came the telepathic reply. Aloud Chaozu said. "It wouldn't have done any good. Nothing I could have said would have kept them from confronting the androids eventually. Habit I suppose. I mean after all, they were warriors - fighting is what they did."

"So now they're all dead." Gohan heard himself say with more than a hint of accusation.

"Had to happen eventually. Most of them are in heaven though. Can you think of a better place for them?"

Gohans brain drew an absolute blank. The question had more than surprised him, it had stirred up a long list of emotions, thoughts and memories that vied for his attention. Gohan simply wasn't prepared to think of death as being a good thing. Death was never a good thing, that's what Gohan had been raised to believe. Death left people lonely. It left worlds vulnerable. If death was a good thing then the warriors of Earth wouldn't have been wishing people back to life so much.

But it was the directness of the question that really got on Gohans nerves. The other warriors had only died yesterday! How could anyone that was a friend of theirs be so calm about it?

"The problem with being a true psychic is that by the time something actually happens, you've already seen it happen enough that you're just glad it's finally over with." Chaozu lifted his head as he spoke, as if he were gazing up at something that nobody else could see.

Which, of course, he was.

After a thoughtful moment of silence he turned to face Gohan, who was still caught somewhere between denial and outrage. Chaozu stared at the demi-saiyan youth with a patient bemused expression that probably could have made statues blink sheepishly. Gohan wasn't able hold that stare for very long, the boys outward anger melted into a blend of confusion and mild distrust.

"You ought to go home for now." Despite always being serious and level, Chaozus voice was never harsh. "We'll talk again later."

With that, in broad daylight, Chaozu snuck off just as effectively as he'd snuck up. Gohan was left wondering why he hadn't even seen which way Chaozu had departed.

Gohan regarded the sky for a bit then shook his head, deciding that he had no desire to see if the energy shield was still in place. _He's too good at this._ Gohan reflected as he turned homeward. _It's like he's been doing this type of thing for eons._

Which, of course, Chaozu had.


	2. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 2**

Kings are people. Mortals. Most kings can trace their ancestry back to some notable inventor, wealthy merchant or war hero. Thus the kings, the first kings, had probably gotten their right to rule from the local people who had seen the notable inventor, the wealthy merchant or the war hero and who had been so inspired that they'd made that person their leader. That's how kings came about. Good kings, anyway.

Emperors are a bit more complex because empires were often made up of several kingdoms and so an emperor typically ruled over several kings. Thus emperors had to get their right to rule from higher authorities than people. Divine authorities to be precise. Usually a would-be emperor had to carefully select a patron god from the local pantheon and then proceed, in a relatively convincing fashion, to claim to be the descendant of that god. Which of course meant that the emperors themselves ended up being considered minor gods and because of this an emperor held as much influence in religious circles as political ones. So minor god, high priest, king of kings - that was what an emperor was expected to be. All of those titles combined.

The consensus of the general public was that an emperor only became divine when he - or she, as the case may be - was officially coronated. In other words, the person only became a god when they were _crowned_ the emperor. Which was, as Chaozu knew for a fact, false.

At least in his case it was false. Crowned or not, Chaozu had always felt that you couldn't just up and declare yourself to be a minor god one day. Not if you wanted respect, at any rate. No. In order to become a _proper_ emperor you had to be _born_ a god. Even though words like 'born' tended to have vastly different meanings to supernatural beings.

Chaozu had a handful of extremely hazy memories about his birth carefully stored in the back of his mind where they wouldn't bother anyone. He wasn't sure how long ago the joyous event had been but from what he recalled, the process had involved a paintbrush and something about the way moonlight had struck a sentient waterlily. He wasn't entirely clear on the rest and honestly, he wasn't sure that he wanted to be. It was generally best not to question ones own creation.

He'd been a god _long_ before he'd ever been an emperor.

Oh it was true that Chaozu wasn't invincible. But unlike so many emperors who'd only claimed to have divine blood, he actually had it. He was immortal. He'd died more than once before although on such occasions the term 'dead' had only ever been an accurate description of his physical condition. Mentally and spiritually and so forth, he'd been fine. If his friends hadn't wished him back to life the last couple times then he would have eventually found his way back anyway. He always had before. And after a while with a routine like that, Chaozu had accumulated enough knowledge of the past to become aware of the future.

_Futures._ Chaozu hovered in place and wrinkled his nose in a way that had nothing to do with twigs that he'd been gathering from the forest floor.

Time was such an indecisive bugger. Predicting the future was - if you simplified the entire process so that it could be described in a mere four dimensions - comparable to standing atop a skyscraper and dropping a penny over the side. You knew that the coin would fall, you could count on that much, but you just wouldn't always be able to tell where or when the penny had landed. It wouldn't always be clear right away whether the coin was heads or tails or on its side or embedded into someones vital organs. Time didn't plan that far ahead. Time was, in its own subtle way, unpredictable. You could get the general gist of time if you tried but the details tended to remain sketchy in a manner that could occasionally reduce even the best of psychics to guessing.

It was during uncertain moments that rituals provided a sense of comfort.

Chaozu glanced at the bundle of narrow leafless sticks he had collected and nodded with approval. _That should be enough._ He tied the stack of twigs together at one end with a length of bark and drifted away from the trees, out into the city.

Or at least, it had been city. Now it looked more like what could happen if a hurricane got ahold of a cement mixer during a violent earthquake.

His friends were here somewhere, what little was physically left of them anyway. Chaozu shivered as he did his best to NOT think about how a corpse might look after being slammed through a city block, blasted repeatedly and buried under a few tons of shattered glass and jagged concrete. He had no intention of going in search of the bodies. He preferred to remember his friends as more than whatever was currently left of them. The sheer amount of wreckage in the scene around him offered enough closure on the matter.

_Least it was quick for most of them. Too fast to be very painful, certainly._ Chaozu reasoned. He let a minuscule amount of energy leap from his fingertips to the unbound tips of the twigs. Immediately the air was filled with the mingled scents of ten different woods burning.

Incense was one of the only things that Chaozu had ever liked about temples. He'd felt that this gesture - the burning of incense - would be an appropriate way to acknowledge the changes. He couldn't mourn the dead. He knew that their souls were okay. But some of them had been good friends and he would miss their company. _But you're in good company now, aren't you?_ Chaozu thought as if addressing the souls of the deceased.

Yes, that was a fact. They'd have company whether or not they liked it - a lot of people had died yesterday. And creatures had been dying for rather a long time, too. So everyone would get to meet at least a few of their ancestors. Tenshinhan would finally get to see his parents again. Yamucha would eventually locate his siblings. Yajirobe would be reunited with his whole samurai clan. Krillen was going to be up to his neck in the spirits of temple cats that he'd considered pets while growing up. Plus of course Goku would be there, with some relatives of his own, waiting to greet all of them.

Piccolo and Vegeta. Well... Chaozu decided not to speculate. It didn't actually matter which way they'd gone, they wouldn't be among strangers.

That was one of the catches with divinity really. Mortals had it nice. Being dead wasn't so bad when you could share the experience with friends, enemies, family, pets and anyone else that happened to be around. With the exception of his last two deaths, dying had always made Chaozu feel a bit like misdirected luggage. Nobody in the afterlife had been waiting there to greet him because minor gods weren't expected to die all that frequently. And even if anyone ever did wait...

Chaozu sighed inaudibly. He didn't want to think about that possibility right now.

He held the burning twigs in such a way that he appeared to have a fragrant wooden fan that was rapidly shrinking. He muttered a few blessings that he'd memorized from his days trapped at the temple then tossed the bundle reverently onto the ground in front of him. The flames flickered but once the twigs were gone, there wasn't anything left to burn. The small fire gradually went out with a gasping sound and thin stream of perfumed smoke.

Everything flammable about the city had been turned to ashes yesterday. Though in some places - at a former gas station, for example - the fires continued.

An idea crossed Chaozus mind. All things considered, burning the remains of the city to the ground could only be an improvement. A fire would take care of the corpses before they had a chance to start a plague. It would clean up the landscape as well. If there was nothing left of the disaster to look at then...

No. He wouldn't do it. Not yet, anyway. The rest of the world needed the disaster area for now - it was a warning to them. It made the situation real.

Well... actually... No, it didn't. Chaozu was all too aware of the fact that the majority of the worlds human population had gotten up, pulled on their clothes, drank their coffee and gone to work as if it was just another day. Which it was, for them.

South Capital City had been reduced to roughly thirty square miles of charred rubble. Most of the world hadn't noticed yet. In distant places - primitive villages scattered in the mountain regions - the people might not ever notice. In more modern places, the people probably wouldn't notice until they picked up a phone and dialed a number that had been in South Capital City. And even when they couldn't get the call to go through, they wouldn't understand what it meant right away.

People didn't always notice things like missing cities. Chaozu knew this from experience. Twenty-two years ago he'd been sitting on the throne of an empire that was now, for the most part, long forgotten. The few mortals that had survived the revolution generally hadn't made it with their sanity intact so not even they remembered much about the former empire.

That had been a bit of a disappointment, the revolution. The empire'd had so much potential - he'd had all kinds of plans for it - and then voosh. The whole thing had gotten wiped out of existence just because some army of heavily armed thugs had wanted to skip a few steps on their way up the ladder of success.

_Aw well._ Chaozu dusted ash off his dark green tunic and flew back towards the shade offered by the trees. _Nothing lasts forever._

And it was better that way. Being psychic, Chaozu had formed some very strong opinions in regards to time and it was his firm belief that clinging to the past would only serve to mess up the future. However it was remotely possible that time was circular. So maybe the past and the future were really the same thing.

Chaozu tactfully opted to think about something less disturbing for a while. But as he flew along, he couldn't help noticing that a few humans from South Capital City had survived. He could see them.

A battered cluster of refugees that sat in silence, crouched around a small camp fire and listening warily for sounds of danger. Wearing ragged clothes and equally ragged expressions. A few of them were clutching tree branches like weapons. Most of the people had probably never seen each other before the android attack had caused unlikely paths to cross...

... Near a cave. Of all the places the refugees could have gone after fleeing their decimated city - they'd gone to a cave.

Mentally, Chaozu flinched.

* * *

Mentally, Gohan flinched. He was at school in Satan City, slumping forward in his seat near the back of the classroom and gazing out the window with his chin resting on his arms.

There hadn't been any reason not to go to school. Satan City was intact and so life there was going on as usual. The residents weren't aware of how much the world had been altered in the last twenty-four hours. South Capital City was... or rather, had been... on a completely different island continent. Nobody in Satan City had seen the damage done and even if they had, seeing wasn't necessarily believing.

Ultimately Gohan had gone to school because he hadn't wanted to stay around the house. Staying home would have just worried his mother and ChiChi had enough to worry about without adding her sons mental health to the list. Gohan hadn't even told her about the other warriors being dead yet. He'd meant to say something about it to her but the words eluded him. Gohan almost wished that his mother was as sensitive to energy as he was - then words wouldn't have been necessary at all.

He wasn't paying attention to the biology teacher. As fascinating as the lecture was, Gohan couldn't bring himself to focus on the lesson. He was too busy trying to figure out if yesterday had actually happened. He was fairly sure that it had but... If evil androids had really truly blown a city flat then he shouldn't be sitting in biology class, should he? And yet there he was.

It was the androids fault. They weren't like other enemies. If he'd been able to track their ki - which he wasn't because androids didn't have ki - Gohan would have hunted them down in a heartbeat. Which probably would have been a fairly stupid thing to do. Because for some inexplicable reason the androids didn't seem capable of feeling pain. Not even when a Super Saiyan assaulted them.

That part bothered Gohan a lot. He'd put everything he'd had into his attacks yesterday and the androids had barely even noticed his presence. Evil enemies were one thing but invincible evil enemies... Gohan wasn't used to that. It struck a bad chord. There was something off about those androids. They shouldn't be as strong as they were and it wasn't just his Saiyan pride telling him as much, it was science.

Gohan knew that he was the energy equivalent of a thermonuclear explosive. The androids, at their very best, shouldn't have been much more resistant than... than... Well. They shouldn't have been anywhere near as resistant to damage as they had managed to be. They were just robots, after all! Human-shaped clumps of metal. And metal was not supposed to be capable of withstanding the kinds of stresses that a very upset Super Saiyan could introduce.

_If yesterday happened at all,_ Gohan thought resolutely, _it should have happened differently._

But it hadn't. And Gohan was at a loss to work out why.

Another section of his brain was preoccupied with an ongoing internal debate about death that was slowly giving him a headache. Death had to be a bad thing. It had always been a bad thing before. And yet... Gohan had to admit that if nobody had ever died, the world would be an awfully crowded place. So maybe death was only moderately bad or only bad for some people or something complicated like that. Which wasn't an easy concept for a ten year old to accept.

Lately though, he'd been thinking several things that were difficult to accept.

The blue sky abruptly flashed neon orange. The ground shook. All of Gohans philosophical ideas came to a screeching halt that left one terrified little thought cringing by itself in his skull. _They're here!_

* * *

Waves rippled outward in concentric circles as the submarine surfaced. The vessel wasn't simply coming up, it was also traveling forward. Entering the shallow waters around the beach as it rose above the waves - so that by the time the entire vehicle was exposed, it was parked on the white sand. A creaky hatch swiveled open.

The first figure to hop down onto the beach was a short creature in overalls with pale pink skin, a snout and floppy ears. He was muttering a variety of curses about submarines in general. Which was only natural. Pigs were not seafaring creatures. No matter how humanoid Oolong had become, he would always instinctively dislike being underwater.

The second creature that exited the submarine did so without once setting foot on the sand. It was a small blue-gray rectangle of fur with a round head, pointed ears, a white-tipped tail and a tanned underside that hovered about five feet off the ground. "Is it over?" Puar asked in anxious tones, her whiskers twitching as she drifted forward. "Did anyone else... I mean... you know?"

Chaozu made a face. "I'm not sure at the moment." He reluctantly admitted, attempting to sound reassuring despite the circumstances.

"Not sure?" Oolong echoed in disbelief. "But... you're psychic! How can you not be sure?"

Two more figures stood by the submarine now and it was these that Chaozu had come in search of. The taller of the pair was an elderly fellow clad in a loose floral print shirt and khaki shorts. He had a giant turtle shell strapped across his back. The hair on his head took the form of a short white beard, a matching mustache and a pair of bushy eyebrows. He leaned on a wooden cane that had a knob near the top. He wore sandals on his feet and was rarely seen without a pair of dark sunglasses obscuring his eyes.

"Ah, good to be back on land." Master Roshi stretched and expertly snatched a magazine out of thin air. "More light to read by out here."

Roshi had always claimed that he was just a martial arts master but Chaozu knew better. The harmless looking wooden cane was a staff. Roshi was a wizard. Not a very talented one but a wizard nonetheless. Magic ran in his family. Most of it had run to his sister.

She was there too, Uranai Baba. A woman three foot tall and clad in a pitch black robe with voluminous sleeves. The wrinkled yellowish skin of her face was hidden by the wide brim of a pointed black hat. Bright red hair reached down to her shoulders. Beneath her feet levitated a crystal ball.

One look at that crystal ball confirmed Chaozus worst fears. Because usually when you looked at a crystal ball you saw the future or the past or a colorful but mysterious swirling mist or - if the crystal ball wasn't in use - your own bent reflection. But this crystal ball, when you looked into it there was just static. So something WAS wonky with time then. He'd been afraid of that. _History repeats itself._ Chaozu thought with a shudder. He'd always heard people say that it could happen but now that it was actually happening...

"Not quite." said Uranai Baba.

And because she'd spoken aloud, the shapeshifters each arced an eyebrow as if to say 'huh?'.

Chaozu on the other hand, was immensely relieved. He'd had a long interesting life but there were more than a few parts of it that he didn't care to relive.

Uranai Baba wasn't merely a skilled witch that specialized in fortune telling with the occasional reincarnation. She'd been a witch for eons. No one was quite sure of Uranai Babas age but there were rumors claiming she was older than the local gods. Which was why the gods hadn't ever been ashamed to turn to Uranai Baba for a second opinion on things. She always seemed to understand what was going on. She didn't often get involved in the events of Earth but she always understood them. It was her business to understand things and an incredibly profitable business too.

"There IS a time distortion though, isn't there?" Chaozu ventured.

Uranai Baba nodded. "It's because of the time machine."

This remark earned her more than few awkward stares.

"WHAT time machine?" Oolong eventually blurted out.

"It hasn't been built yet." said Uranai Baba. "It'll be finished sixteen years from now."

Oolong and Puar remained utterly confused. Roshi remained completely absorbed in his reading material which didn't actually require a lot of reading since it was mostly pictures. But Chaozu was bright enough that his brain made the connections.

Time travel... time travel... You'd have to go lightspeed of course because at lightspeed everywhere was technically the same place and everyWHEN was the same time. That was common knowledge nowadays - it was the whole e=mc2 thing, the most famous science formula in existence. Energy(e) equals mass(m) multiplied by the speed of light squared(c2). You didn't have to be a scientist anymore to appreciate that energy moving at the speed of light just naturally distorted gravity, mass, space and time so that items could arrive before they had technically left.

There was the one other relevant formula and that was just basic algebra. Distance(d) equals time(hr) multiplied by the rate of acceleration(mph). Lightspeed meant traveling 200,000 miles per second which translated to covering a lot of distance very quickly. Although you might not think that you'd gone anywhere. And come to think of it, how on Earth would you survive hitting the brakes on a vehicle that was moving at 200,000 miles per second? And actually, for that matter, what if you didn't end up on Earth at all?

Anyway. When people had broken the sound barrier for the first time, they'd discovered an amazing side effect: the sonic boom. Noise that could only be heard _after_ it had been made instead of _while_ it was being made. So if people started running around at lightspeed on time machines then the logical side effect - aside from people being reduced to extremely small particles if they made any sort of steering error - might be ripples in the very fabric of time. Ripples that happened _before_ they'd been made.

"Yes, sort of." Uranai Babas voice was deceptively calm. "It's like dropping a penny off the side of a skyscraper, watching it fall towards the ground and then having it land on your head. The dimensions get twisted."

"... I think I'll go back in the submarine." Oolong grumbled as he climbed through the hatch. "Somehow the prospect of being trapped underwater in an airtight container doesn't seem as frightening anymore."

Puar was a tad more stubborn in these types of situations. The diminutive shapeshifting cat spoke with her fur bristling and her ears flattened back. "Would someone please tell me what the HECK is going on?"

"Well apparently I can't see the future," Chaozu said, "because the past hasn't been wholly decided yet."

"That's the trouble with time machines." Uranai Baba asserted with a grave nod, "Takes the stability out of things. It's as if time itself has become a shapeshifter."

"Oh." Puar relaxed. "Is that all?"

Uranai Baba bowed her head. "No."

And right then, the blue sky of the northern horizon flashed neon orange. And it didn't take a psychic to realize that the androids could track ki and that Gohans ki was among the most visible on the planet.

Chaozu mentally swore in a language that hadn't been used for a couple thousand years.

"We can take care of time-space." Uranai Baba almost sounded nervous. "But you've got to deal with _them_."

* * *

Elsewhere... The ground was lava. Dark red liquid fire that oozed, boiled, bubbled, spat and hissed. In a few places just below the surface the fires burned bright white and yellow. Wisps of black smoke and grey steam hung close to the ground, creating a dense curtain of drifting fog that made the area humid and even less pleasant to smell. The stench of decay filled the air with the pungent aroma of sulfur woven in. Muffled screams and a wide assortment of ominous creaking sounds echoed throughout the caverns. Occasional flashes of light would briefly illuminate sights better left unseen.

A tall, somewhat elfin figure hovered above the lava. It clutched a wooden staff with three clawed fingers. It wore a long white robe that was trimmed in black thread. The symbols for the creatures name were stitched in red on the front of the robe: Kami.

He frowned at the scene around him and tried to get his bearings. _Hell._ Kami thought with disgust, loading the word with a thousand unspoken meanings. Having been the Guardian of Earth for the past three hundred and ten years, Kami tended to have strong feelings on these issues.

Kami did not approve of the existence of hell. This was largely because Kami didn't understand why any living thing would want to damn its deceased peers to this sort of place. It didn't make any sense. Punishing dead souls didn't make things better. Kami often wondered if the humans - and any other species humanoid enough to understand the concept of hell - would ever realize just how awful they'd made the place. The area he was in now, the dark caverns with the lava swamp floor, was considered one of the most mild levels. Kami knew this because he took it upon himself to visit hell in the same way that people on Earth might visit hospitals and for basically the same sort of reasons. You never really appeciated your health until you went to visit a hospital. Never really appreciated your blessings until you came to a place where there were none.

Out of the mist a gruff voice remarked. "You don't belong here."

"Nobody does." Kami replied without looking for the owner of the voice that had spoken since he wasn't sure what he'd end up seeing.

The unseen speaker snorted in mild amusement. "Yet they say everyone's down here for a reason." Light flashed through the cavern and for an instant, a shadow was outlined against a section of fog. "What's yours?"

Kami relaxed slightly. What he'd seen of the shadow had been familiar enough. His robes rustled as he turned. "Aha. I thought it was you."

"And I thought you said that you wouldn't be back for a couple weeks." The figure was standing nearby, a muscular human shape only a couple inches taller than Kami himself. It had spikey dark hair and appeared to be wearing a chestplate of faded blue-grey armor. Black fabric worn under the armor enhanced the warriors ability to blend in with the surrounding darkness.

"Circumstance has made me liar." Kami said. "Besides, the boy wonders about you."

There was a polite silence between them while this last remark was absorbed. Kami understood how much the words meant to a soul trapped in hell.

Staring upward, the figure made a noise that was a cross between a wistful sigh and a bitter chuckle. "Yea...? Well maybe someday I'll get up there and introduce myself to the kid."

"Bardock, if you help me then I may be able to renegotiate your fate with Lord Enma. Perhaps get you some time off for good behavior." Kami twitched each of his two antenna in turn. "Does that sound like a fair deal?"

For a skeptical moment Bardock stared at the Namekian god of Earth. Then he nodded. "Eh. Sure. Why not?" He muttered, thinking that while alive he'd taken orders from stranger creatures without expecting much in return. "So what are you up to?"

"A lot that I can't explain yet. Currently what I require the most is a guide and a translator." Kami smiled and added in a half-joking tone. "By any chance, are you fluent in Saiyan?"


	3. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 3**

Androids are not the sort of thing that a boy scout can assemble in his garage. There aren't any kits for androids sold at hobby shops. You couldn't just slap a few pieces of metal together and call it an android. Well. You could try but the end result wouldn't be an android, not by any stretch of the imagination. No. Real androids were the sort of projects that took years worth of patience, devotion, money and attention to detail. In short - real androids took craftsmanship.

Insanity was almost a prerequisite for android building. But a sane scientist could get by as long as they had some pent up frustration, precision welding equipment and an intimate knowledge on the subject of reanimating corpses. Oh yes, the androids had been regular humans before they'd become androids. Regular dead humans. So it hadn't hurt them to become androids. They hadn't felt the diverse assortment of wires, rods and computer chips being carefully added to their anatomies by a few brilliant lunatics.

It wasn't the sort of thing that always worked either. As their names clearly indicated, Androids 17 and 18 hadn't been the first androids ever built. They were just the first ones that had worked properly.

A bit too properly, the several recently deceased members of the Red Ribbon Army might have added if they hadn't been quite so dead.

They'd gotten impatient - that's what had been their undoing. After countless years of fiddling around in secret underground labs with corpses and wires and a minimal rate of success, the scientists of the Red Ribbon Army'd had a sudden flash of inspiration. And being the sorts of criminals that seized everything, they'd practically pounced on the concept. They'd immediately gone to work on a pair of androids, one boy and one girl. The last two androids that they'd ever need to build. Because logically, androids were human enough to... And if they just COULD then the offspring would have to be another android, wouldn't it? The idea had instantly seemed like a MUCH better way of doing things. No more midnight raids of the cemetary for starts.

Unfortunately, in order to ensure that the androids were attracted to each other and not to anything else, the Red Ribbon Army had inadvertantly programmed the robots to think humans were inferior. And the computers inside the androids had interpreted that command a smidge differently than the former Red Ribbon Army had expected. To put it succinctly, Androids 17 and 18 were far more interested in exterminating humankind than they were in creating androidkind.

However that wasn't entirely just because of a programming error.

* * *

The two denim-clad robots hovered above a very specific part of Satan City, the sunlight glinting off their metallic skin as they stared down at something. Or rather, at someone.

"Look who we've found Sister." Android 17 said in way that no android could be programmed to speak. The speech pattern, the tone of voice, the facial expression - it was all far too fluent to have been the result of a few strings of code. "Amazing how quickly he's recovered, hmmm?"

Android 18 narrowed her blue eyes. Yesterday she'd beaten Gohan within an few inchs of death so it annoyed Android 18 to see that her former victim still had a pulse. She smirked wickedly and went through the motions of cracking her knuckles - the joints didn't actually crack. "Bet he can't do it again."

Down below... Gohan knew that he was stronger than he'd been yesterday because recovering from near-death always had that effect on him. That was just part of being Saiyan. By default anything that didn't kill Gohan made him stronger. If he could just get angry then he'd be able to find out if he was strong enough...

But he couldn't get angry. He was too confused. If death was okay then what was there to be angry about?

_Augh! I've got get out of here!_ Gohan thought for the thousandth time in last two minutes. He didn't move. His conscience wouldn't let him. He couldn't just leave an entire city of defenseless people to be... well... defenseless. It wouldn't be right. Wouldn't be heroic. It wasn't that Gohan really wanted to be heroic, he'd just learned to be. Heroic was second nature for him. Young children learned by imitating adults and for the first four years of his life, Gohan had been imitating his father. He barely realized that he was doing it most the time.

_Your father's been dead for a year!_ Screamed the part of Gohans brain that certain other warriors had influenced. _You want to imitate that?_

"NO!"

A rush of air and a trail of energy lingered in the space where Gohan had been standing.

_Maybe they'll follow me._ He thought frantically as he tore upwards, wondering what his odds of luring the androids away from the city were and trying to rationalize his own actions so that he didn't feel quite as guilty and unheroic. _Yea. That's it, maybe they'll..._

With a sizzling sound, a narrow beam of white energy lanced through the air right beside him.

_... use me as target practice! AHHHHHH!_ Gohan dodged another blast, shielded his face with his arms then dove. Plummeting downward. He pulled up at the last moment and darted off at a lower altitude, weaving through the maze of buildings at a speed that made him invisible to human eyes.

Battle instincts took over. For survival purposes, Gohan stopped being a terrified ten year old boy. Fear would just get him killed and even if death was a good thing, he didn't feel prepared to die. He wondered if anyone ever did. No time to think about that right now though.

Gohan spun around, the energy forming in his palms as he strained to make out his attackers. He had no idea where they were.

Until a building about two blocks away burst into flames. With increasing horror Gohan realized that he truly couldn't run away. Because the androids would find him eventually anyway and in the meantime... Tears welled up in Gohans eyes as the building creaked and very slowly fell over. He could hear the screaming people, the crackling flames, the breaking glass, the grating thud of steel beams impacting asphalt...

It was happening again.

From head to toe, every single individual molecule of Gohans body shuddered and began to radiate far more energy than it had been previously. His pale orange aura exploded outward as it changed color, becoming much brighter. Golden.

It was happening again. Nothing could have made him angrier.

* * *

On an island of white sand a lone figure stood reading a magazine. Two other figures hovered nearby.

"Erm." Puar blinked a few times and raised a paw to her mouth, coughing politely around it before she spoke. "Ahem. I couldn't help but notice that you said WE would fix time-space."

And Uranai Baba thought. _I said COULD fix time-space. Not WOULD. We can try._

But it would have been completely unprofessional for anyone that was even one-eighth as psychic as she was to admit any such thing aloud. Even though she wasn't currently all that psychic because the timeline was bent out of shape and the future was being more unpredictable than usual. The witch spoke in a calm voice. "Yes. I did, didn't I?"

Puar fidgeted with her tail and made a mental note that Uranai Baba was someone to avoid playing poker against. The witch knew how to bluff. "Yes. Uhm. Well. So... You know. HOW do we go about fixing it then?"

Silence lapsed over the island. The cat who had been a desert bandit and the witch who had been an oracle stared across the sand at each other. In the instant when their eyes met, they recognized each other as being different branches of the same trade. Oracles, bandits - they all lived by information. And right now they didn't have much.

It took a certain sort of stupid wisdom to come up with ideas at this point. The type of wisdom that wouldn't reject an idea on the basis of sounding impossible.

"Just have to find Time and set 'em straight, I reckon." Master Roshi carefully rolled up his magazine and tucked it under an arm. Then he smiled a wide friendly smile - an expression that lacked a few a teeth due to age but that still had bite. "Didn't you say before that the ripples in time were caused by something that hasn't been built yet? Cause if that's the case," Roshi thumped the tip of his staff into the sand for emphasis, "then the thing to do is smack Time a bit and remind 'em of where things are."

The fundamental difference between oracles and wizards is that oracles spend most their lives making sense of things while true wizards spent their lifetimes pursuing nonsense. The world is in pretty serious trouble when a wizard starts to be the one who explains things.

"Yea. Sure." Puar muttered in bewilderment. "N' pigs can fly."

A voice drifted out of the submarine that was parked on the sand. It said: "Only small aircraft."

* * *

_See?_ Thought the part of Gohans brain that was definitely Saiyan. _Being angry is good. Doesn't hurt to get angry now and then._

_Doesn't hurt the androids anyway._ Grumbled the part of his brain that was a ten year old human boy. _Exactly how is being strong enough to accidentally decimate the city on my own going to help anything? I'd be as bad as them._

His hair flickered between pitch black and golden, his eyes went between pitch black and aquamarine.

His knuckles were white.

Gohan didn't want to think at a time like this. He wanted to just do something. But he'd hesitated because he didn't want to do the wrong thing, whatever that was. What was the right thing to do in a situation like this? What was the lesser evil? Should he run away and leave the city to be destroyed or start a fight that would probably destroy the city anyway?

He thought of the androids. They'd had bloodstains on their hands. And the blood hadn't been their own. Androids probably couldn't even bleed. The memories of what they'd done yesterday... An involuntary shiver ran the length of Gohans spine. It was too fresh in his mind now. He was afraid of them again. He couldn't fight the androids like this, not even if he was a little stronger. Because when you were afraid of someone and they hit you - it hurt worse than it would otherwise. Much worse.

_RUN AWAY!_

This thought wasn't his own but it seemed sensible so Gohan decided to listen to it.

Still, he didn't leave immediately. He was too heroic for that. Gohan slowed down enough that he could grab someone and carry them with him. Because he wanted to at least save one person. Hurriedly, he'd just reached for the nearest person. He only looked down once - to be sure that he wasn't grabbing an android.

The girl clobbered him with a bookcase.

Not a book. Not a couple of books or a backpack full of books. A bookcase. An entire bookcase. Full of books, even.

Gohan blinked rapidly as he reeled back. "ow..." Then he fainted. The bookcase had managed to hit a few pressure points. Without his energy to support him, Gohan dropped from the sky. But he didn't fall far. Something caught him and just kind of levitated him there. Gohans twitching form was outlined in the pale glow of an aura that didn't belong to him.

"Congratulations." Chaozu told the girl as he arrived on the scene. "You have single handedly defeated a super saiyan with a bookcase."

The girl scowled. Her face was framed by two ponytails of dark hair. She wore a baggy sweatshirt that hung down to her knees, a pair of shorts that didn't and tennis shoes. "I don't know WHAT a super saiyan is but it had no right to pick me up like that! The nerve!" She frowned at Chaozu. "And what are YOU supposed to be anyway?"

Chaozu spoke in a tone so dry that it would have made deserts seem wet by comparision. "Are you aware of the fact that people who want introductions usually state their own name first?"

"Fine." The girl huffed. "I'm Videl."

"Good for you." Chaozu said sincerely. "Now if you'll excuse me, I was about to make an escape. You can come if you want."

A shadow fell over them. "Tsk, tsk." Android 17 smirked down, his voice laced with a dangerous edge of mock-disappointment. "What, leaving already? Without even saying goodbye? Where ARE your manners?"

* * *

Puar twitched an ear. "The problem with looking for time is that it's _everywhere._ Right? It's always been everywhere. Right?"

"Oh no. Time wasn't always so popular. Took a while to catch on." mused Master Roshi. "Fact is that even today there are still some places that are considered timeless."

"Comes from people killing time, doesn't it?" Oolong was accepting the bizarre explanation with the sort of ease that only people who'd ever been friends with Master Roshi could understand. "Not to mention the whole zoning thing."

Master Roshi grimaced and nodded. "The zoning was especially bad."

"You try and get ahold of Time then. Maybe it'll have some useful advice." Uranai Baba had been thinking and she'd reached a conclusion. The crystal ball rotated beneath her feet until she was facing north.

"And where will you be going?"

Two words fell from her lips like stones. "Capsule Corp."

The shapeshifters heard Master Roshi gasp in horror. "You can't! Have you forgotten? The variable -"

"Precisely. That's why I must go there." Uranai Baba stood with her back to the others. She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes for a long moment then spoke quietly in voice that was solemn, pleasant and almost teasing. Almost. Not quite. "In case I don't come back though, I just have to say - Roshi, you are the worst little brother that anyone could hope for."

She gripped the wide brim of her pointed hat with a hand and took a step forward. The crystal ball responded instantly, flying forward and carrying Uranai Baba with it. Soon she was nothing more than a dark speck on the horizon.

Master Roshi stood rigidly with a hand over his heart for a minute after she'd departed. "Brave woman, my sister." He sniffled sadly. "I'll really miss picking on her." Turning to the pair of shapeshifters, he spoke in much more cheerful tones. "C'mon kids! We're going to pay a visit to Time."

* * *

The sky was white. Android 17 remained calm. He'd seen this attack before. In fact, he'd seen it yesterday. According to his data it was called Taiyouken, the solar flare attack and all it did was flood the sky with dazzling white light for a few moments. The light would fade soon and when that happened, the pale midget warrior would be an easy target.

It was a bit disturbing how well the midget blended in with the currently white sky though. Not that Android 17 was worried - an enraged Saiyan couldn't put a dent in him. Android 17 didn't know the meaning of fear.

He was about to learn.

The dazzling white light faded. But the sky was still white.

* * *

"Hey, give that back!" Videl demanded. "How am I supposed to carry the bookcase now?"

"You CAPSULIZED him?" Gohan had regained consciousness quickly. He hovered in place with eyes that were momentarily the size of dinner plates, ran a nervous hand through his hair and frowned before voicing his thoughts aloud as if he didn't expect anyone else to hear him mumbling. "Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't ANYONE think of that yesterday?"

Chaozu shrugged. "With all due respect, fighting and thinking don't often go together very well. But maybe they just didn't have capsules." He glanced towards Videl. "Thanks by the way."

"_'Thanks'_ is not going to help me get the bookcase back to the library." Videl folded her arms.

"Oh nice." Gohan growled. "This is what you get for saving people, eh? And in case you hadn't noticed Miss, the library has burnt down."

Videl rolled her eyes as she crouched beside the bookcase - the bottom shelf had a logo embedded into the wood, a circle with the text 'Capsule 4057' printed inside - and began to gather the scattered books into her arms. After muttering a few choice words about delusional maniacs, she glared up at the warriors. "If you're not going to help me then go away."

"... I swear, I'm never gonna understand some peopleeeeeeeek!" While turning to leave, Gohan caught sight of the Satan City public library. The building stood there completely unscathed as if nothing had happened to it. "But... How? It did burn to the ground! I saw it! Honest!"

"Uh-huh. That's nice." Videl said with mock sweetness. "And how long have you been seeing things?"

Gohan kept stammering. "But... but... the androids..." He faltered. "Didn't you see it? They flew in and starting killing everyone and..."

"Sounds like someone has been watching too much tv." Videl hauled the bookcase upright and reshelved the books.

_Quit while you're ahead._ advised Chaozu. _She doesn't remember the library burning down._

_But... didn't you see it too?_ Gohan mentally pleaded, _It did happen, didn't it?_

Chaozu didn't answer right away since he was experiencing an odd sensation. It tugged at his fingertips, crackled through his soul and made him squint. He'd been psychic for so long that his instincts hadn't completely abandoned him. He couldn't see the future or the past - the timeline was about as clear as mud - but he could still feel it if he tried. He had a fair idea of what was coming next. Chaozu snapped out of his short trance with a muffled gasp. "Uhm. You know... Maybe we should leave." He hovered behind Gohan and placed a hand on each of the kids shoulders then flew forward, trying to push the youth down the sidewalk in front of them. Away from the library.

"Wha...?" Gohan was more confused than anything else.

Videl had already left. She was jogging towards the Satan City public library to get a new capsule for the bookcase that she'd been on her way to return.

"We really really should leave..." Chaozu sounded increasingly urgent.

Almost as soon as Videl had reached the library and had gone indoors, the building flickered. For an instant it appeared to be on fire again and then it was just smoldering rubble. Videls ki signature was gone.

Chaozu had known that the timeline was twisted but this was bad. Worst than he'd expected. He was the first to break the stunned silence. "That's why she didn't remember it burning down."

* * *

Aliens. Even the nice ones that weren't asking you to destroy random civilizations. The whole trouble with aliens was precisely that they were _alien_. No matter how intelligent the aliens were, they couldn't truly understand a culture that they hadn't been a part of. Aliens were bound to be ignorant of local customs and languages. Aliens wouldn't understand the importance of certain symbols.

They might not even understand something more basic, like social rank.

Bardock felt like he was talking to a canyon where the words echoed without really being heard or understood. He sighed. "You don't know anything about complex caste systems, do you?"

And before Kami could say that he knew enough to dislike caste systems, Bardock continued. "I know that you're a god but you're not one of OUR gods okay? You're just an outsider to Saiyan culture. Most Saiyans would think of you as target practice - that's how you rank. There's no way the royalty will speak to you. They won't even speak to me, do you understand? They only speak to each other, to their generals and occasionally they might say something to someone they're about to kill. But that's it."

Which was why, incidentally, most of the Saiyans didn't speak Saiyan fluently. Bardock himself wasn't anxious to be a translator. He was more familiar with the various alien languages that he'd picked up in space than he was with the Saiyan language.

Kami had been hoping to speak with the Saiyan King and Queen - both of whom were named Vegeta due to another of the unique Saiyan traditions. All the Saiyan royalty was named Vegeta. Having a common name was supposed to remind the royalty that they were responsible for more than just themselves.

"Why do you want to talk to them anyway?" Bardock inquired. He'd stopped being mildly psychic after his death so questions were necessary.

Stepping forward, Kami scowled through the fog as he tried to detect energy signatures. But there were so many of them that it would be difficult to identify an individual ki signature without practically standing in front of the owner. "Well, if the King and Queen won't speak to me..." Kami sounded determined but inwardly he was afraid that the Prince might not have as much influence with the Saiyan Army.

The stern expression on Bardocks face instantly confirmed that thought. "Before you even say it Green One, there isn't a Prince." He shook his head and spoke in a whisper. "Not the kids fault really. I mean how many five year olds do you know that are fully fluent in their own language and understand all the traditions? None, right? Because there aren't any. Our former Prince included."

This was a tad worse than Kami had expected to hear. "They disowned him?"

Bardock nodded grimly. "Said he wasn't Saiyan enough. No tail and all that."

Little red flags were waving frantically in Kamis brain. While Kami wasn't close friends with the Prince, he felt responsible for all the former residents of Earth. "Where is he?"

"Don't worry." Bardock tactfully avoided giving a precise answer. "This is hell. Nobody dies in hell." He smirked and added bitterly. "They just wish they could."

"Should be careful what they wish for." Kami observed with an amount of raw contempt his tone that startled the Saiyan beside him. People tended to forget that the elderly Namek had been a warrior once.


	4. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 4**

The sky was fifteen different shades of white, the ground was at least as many shades of black and the rest of the world was greyscale. Objects had vague fuzzy outlines as if nothing was definite. Videl was alarmed to note that this applied even to herself. Her form faded in and out of existence each time she coughed. The ground was visible through her feet.

HMMMM. It wasn't so much a spoken comment as it was an audible thought.

Videls ghost turned. She was fully prepared to see a tall skeletal human in a long black robe. So she blinked in surprise at the sight that greeted her instead. The creature had a wooden cane instead of a scythe, it didn't wear any robes and it was a far cry from skeletal. Videl placed a hand on her hip - very carefully so that the hand didn't go through her hip - and glowered down in disapproval. "What kind of lousy personification of Death are you, anyway?"

WHY SHOULD DEATH BE HUMAN? The cats eyes were squinted shut yet Videl felt the weight of the creatures stare. CATS HAVE TO DIE NINE TIMES.

Before Videl could reply, a young blue demon appeared nearby. The demon was clutching a clipboard with one hand and alternately adjusting either his tie or his thick-rimmed glasses with his other hand in a series of nervous gestures.

"Erm." The demon looked deceptively human at the moment but the short horns that protruded from his forehead were blatant reminders that the demon could make use of at least one other - presumably much more frightening - form. "Excuse me, Miss? It appears that you've died before your time. So if you'll come with me, we'll get the paperwork sorted out and then Lord Enma..."

Lord Enma was the judge of the dead and undisputed king of the office demons. Which meant that while Lord Enma had influence over the souls of the dead, he wasn't Death. Death preferred to be called Korin. He was better known for martial arts and senzu beans but hey - everyone needed hobbies.

The white cat watched the office demon lead Videls ghost away and twitched his ears thoughtfully. An awful lot of mortals had been dying before their time lately. It could only mean one thing and Korin didn't like what it meant.

More work for him, that's what it meant.

* * *

There was absolutely no point in standing around saying 'that can't happen' because it HAD happened. It didn't make sense and it wasn't fair but it had happened anyway. Life was like that. Gohan was learning to deal with it.

For once the excuses were working too. Gohan had gradually convinced himself that he couldn't really feel anything for someone that he hadn't gotten a chance to know. He'd basically grown up telling himself these same things each time anyone had died in front of him and it seemed like everyone had died in front of him at some point.

First there had been Dad - the first time Goku had died, Gohan had been nearly five years old. And Raditz might have been a jerk but he was also the only person that had ever called Gohan nephew. So even Raditzs death haunted Gohan a little bit because family wasn't supposed to act like that. Just because the bad guys were bad, that didn't make witnessing their deaths a pleasant affair. Anyway. Then Yamucha had died. After which had come the deaths of Chaozu, Tenshinhan, Nappa, Piccolo, Vegeta, Krillen and the residents of Planet Namek in general. Sure, almost everyone who wasn't evil had been wished back to life but that didn't erase Gohans memories of their previous deaths. Not to mention the memories of their more recent and much more permenant deaths.

Gohan was ten years old now and death was such a familiar event to him that, subconsciously, it was almost comforting. It made him feel physically sick to realize this on a conscious level.

Mentally though, Gohan had already told himself that what he'd just seen - it wasn't so bad. It wasn't like he'd actually known the girl or anything. She'd just been part of the background noise of school life. He hadn't ever really even noticed her before. So it wasn't like he would miss her. Heck, he didn't even know her name.

"Videl." Chaozu spoke up from where he was levitating, "Her name was Videl."

Gohan scowled sideways without turning his head or slowing the pace of his walk. "You're not helping."

"Trying to forget isn't helping either." Chaozu pointed out. "You can't deal with things if you're ignoring them." After a pause he added, "Where are we going?"

This brought Gohan to a complete stop. "You're psychic!"

"Yes. Where are we going?"

Gohan tilted his head to one side and squinted distrustfully at the smaller warrior. "You read my mind less than a minute ago." He said accusingly. "You KNOW where-"

Chaozu interrupted him. "Telepathy and precognition aren't the same thing."

"Huh?"

"Your brain and the future are two mostly separate things. So it takes different skills to read each of them. I know what you're thinking but I don't know where we're going." Chaozu clarified, carefully leaving out the bit about not being too sure what the future held anymore. "You don't seem to have decided where we're going yet. That's why I asked."

"But... You're psychic!" Gohan couldn't think of anything better to say at the moment. "Even if I don't know, don't you just... KNOW...?"

Now Chaozu sounded hurt. "What - do you think that just because someone is psychic, they're ALL the DIFFERENT KINDS of psychic? Surely you can't believe that! That's like saying that all martial arts are the same! Nothing could be further from the truth."

Gohan hadn't ever given much thought to the issue of psychic sub-categories because it wasn't something that interested him. He found himself trying to make polite excuses anyway. "Oh. Right. I mean... Of course. That makes sense. I hadn't thought of it that way." Gohan shrugged as he resumed walking. "And I'm not sure where we're going."

He didn't want to go anywhere specifically but he didn't want to stand still either. Gohan felt like he ought to be a moving target. That's what he was, after all, because the other android was still out there and it could track his energy and...

_Where can we get more capsules?_ Almost as soon as he'd thought the question, Gohan knew the answer. _Capsule Corp!_

Seconds later an arc of golden energy departed Satan City, heading west. It was accompanied by the sound of one small voice saying that he was perfectly capable of flying on his own.

* * *

Dr. and Mrs. Briefs were the types of people that left their doors unlocked. They had never invested in electrical fences or hidden cameras or other security devices for their home. They were rich. So the Briefs didn't mind too greatly if people robbed them because they could afford to replace pretty much anything that was stolen. The handful of possessions which the Briefs kept in a hidden vault were the sorts of things that had significantly more sentimental value than market value.

Despite the complete lack of security measures, Capsule Corporation had never been robbed. The famous mansion had been blacklisted by every criminal organization on the planet. Professional assassins wouldn't go near the place. Thieves and mercenaries wouldn't even consider setting foot on the estate.

If asked, the criminals would tell their employers that the Capsule Corp mansion didn't have much worth stealing. Which was true. The furniture in the Capsule Corp mansion wasn't antique, the paintings on the walls weren't done by famous artists and there weren't piles of cash laying around. Any money that hadn't been invested into stocks or projects was kept in bank accounts. Truly, the most valuable things in the whole mansion - aside from the people who lived there - were the random sketches that Mrs. Briefs did and Dr. Briefs was about the only person on Earth who could make enough sense of those to build what she designed.

The story that the criminals told each other about Capsule Corp was significantly different. A monster protected Capsule Corp, they said. A terrible souless creature. Any stranger that tried to enter the house without being invited in by one of the Briefs would soon be wishing that they'd never been born. The criminals swore it up and down, on every oath they had. They described the monster as being a giant hideous creature whose most notable traits were multiple sharp fangs and claws.

Even Tao Pai Pai, back when he'd been the Worlds Greatest Assassin, had sworn that he'd sooner commit suicide than go near Capsule Corp.

A ninja arrived at the mansion, slinking through the shadows and muttering that those drunken idiots at the guild weren't fooling anyone. He'd heard the story of the monster but all he believed about it was that his peers were trying to scare him so that they could keep the loot for themselves.

The back door was wide open. The ninja hesitated. He could just walk in but somehow, using the door didn't seem appropriate. No self-respecting ninja would use the door. The door was too obvious.

"Meeeeeeoooooow?" A tiny black kitten sat in the doorway. From the bottom of its paws to the tips of its ears, it couldn't have been much more than four inches tall.

The ninja did his best not to laugh. "So this is the famous monster!"

Unfortunately for him, it was.

* * *

Nearly four hundred or so years before the 'cat' had become a part of the Briefs family, it had been Uranai Babas pet and she'd had the best defended dorm room in the entire Lunar University. Summoning the creature from the underworld had been quite a hazardous undertaking on its own. She'd had to traipse halfway around the globe just to collect the necessary artifacts for the complex spell. Making the monster loyal and disguising it as a small harmless kitten had been additional challenges. But it had all been worth it in the end. Her efforts had paid off. She'd earned the respect of her peers as well as her doctorate degree in Mystic Arts.

Black cats in general had become something of a fashion statement among witches after that. An essential magical accessory. All the trendy modern witches had a black cat or two - for luck they said, bad or good. Because magic could deal with either. As long as you didn't go near Capsule Corp.

With a resounding thud Uranai Babas crystal ball impacted the ground. It had turned to solid stone. For a moment she hovered above it muttering curses then, with a soft whoosh, she also dropped from the sky. Her pointy black hat lingered in the air before drifting to the ground after her.

Magic wasn't stable around Capsule Corp. And it wasn't because of Capsule Corp either, it was because of what Capsule Corp was sitting both on top and inside of.

"RREOW!" Hissed a tiny bundle of bristling black fur.

"It's ME ya mangy fleabag!" Uranai Baba smacked the cat away as she stood up. She was uninjured despite having fallen and this was largely because she'd managed to land on something much softer than the ground.

What was left of the ninja made a few choked gurgling noises. Uranai Baba blanched at the sight, stepped down and paused to wipe her feet off on the grass. Days like this she would think that perhaps she should have summoned a wyvern or a trollbat or anything but the underworlds equivalent of a piranha. The Briefs were such self-absorbed people - they hadn't noticed that their cat had aggressive carnivorous tendancies yet but it was bound to happen eventually. And then what would protect the gate?

"Stupid monster." Uranai Baba grumbled, reaching for her hat. She shook some dust off the fabric before replacing the hat on her head and pulling the brim down at an angle so that it covered her eyes without impairing her vision. She turned left then right, scanning the ground. "All right, where is... Aha!"

She lifted the ninjas feet and heaved a concrete sphere - that, from the looks of things, the ninja had tripped on - out from under them. She frowned at the remains of the ninja then inspected her own hands. She wasn't aging, the anti-age spells hadn't worn off. And then there was the cat, it still LOOKED like a cat so logically... Uranai Baba closed her eyes, concentrated and mumbled a few things under her breath.

When she opened her eyes again, there was a small plastic action figure laying where the ninja had been. Baba grimaced. That wasn't what she'd been trying to do. "Better than nothing I suppose." She told no one in particular.

After a moments consideration Uranai Baba pocketed the ninja action figure. Even in variable magic fields, things happened for a reason. Who knew - maybe the toy would come in handy later. Better safe than sorry. Uranai Baba turned and began to walk the remaining distance to Capsule Corp. She rolled her currently-not-so-crystal ball ahead of her and was followed at a cautious distance by a monster disguised as a small black cat.

* * *

HMMMMM.

"AAAAAHHHH!" Screamed the ghost of the ninja who had recently suffered a fatal encounter with the Briefs Cat. He pointed. "A CAT!"

WHY SHOULD DEATH BE...

"STAY AWAY! STAY AWAY FROM ME!" With true ninja speed, the ghost began to flee. "AAAAHHHH!"

Korin arced an eyebrow and watched the ghost run - or rather, float - away. He shook his head. _Humanoids._ He thought wearily even as an amused grin crept across his face. Only something humanoid would try to outrun Death.

* * *

It wasn't fair. Such an odd thought for someone in hell and yet such a very appropriate thought. Hell was meant to be fair. If you spent your life doing severely evil things to others then when you died, you went to hell and had severely evil things done to you. It was the old 'an eye for eye', 'what goes around comes around' and all that. Very fair. Or at least, the original design had been.

The problem with life was that, especially when compared to death, it was short. So in the end evil people who'd only lived for say, thirty-five years, might be sentenced to spend eternity being punished. Which really wasn't fair, no matter what the delegates of heaven said.

Of course that was the other main problem with hell - heaven tried to be in charge of it.

Prince Vegeta had been in hell for a day. A day that felt roughly like ten years. Ten very bad years. How had those stupid robots killed him anyway? It didn't make any sense! And why hadn't anyone wished him back to life yet? Earth might have been a miserable pointless existence but it was infinately better than being on the receiving end of the Saiyan Armys temper.

Which was where he was now. Vegeta had tried to explain that the Earthlings had cut his tail off in battle a long time ago and that he didn't know why the stupid limb had failed to regrow. While alive he'd been in regeneration tanks, he'd eaten senzu beans, he'd even let that one Namekian kid heal him - but his tail had never come back.

And the Saiyan language. Oh Vegeta knew more than enough of the Saiyan language - if you paused to consider that he hadn't had any reason to use his native language for the past five years. There certainly hadn't been anyone on Earth to speak the language to. So he'd gotten out of practice. Not that Saiyan elite were meant to be talkative anyway. Plus there was the fact that the Saiyan language was ancient and consequently, outdated. There wasn't a true Saiyan word for 'computer' - that word, along with most of Saiyan technology, had been borrowed from other cultures. There weren't Saiyan words for a quarter of the things that Earthlings had words for. Why bother to speak Saiyan if you couldn't say what you needed to?

Vegeta had tried to explain all of this. But nobody had been in the mood to listen. So they'd disowned him. His own parents had declared him an outsider and a weakling. And that made it okay for the entire Saiyan Army to take turns beating him senseless.

Even as a Super Saiyan, Vegeta hadn't stood a chance. He'd spent the last twenty-four hours curled in ball, trying to cheer himself up with the thought that he still had Saiyan genetics and he couldn't die in hell - and that meant he had get stronger eventually. Hopefully. It was going to take a few hundred more near-deaths before he could take on even a fraction of the Army by himself though.

There was one other coherant thought left in Vegetas brain at this point and it was: _Maybe I shouldn't have killed Nappa._

He hadn't been able to see clearly for what felt like eons but Vegeta knew that somewhere on the other end of the countless attacks that battered his form, Nappa was grinning. Because Nappa was the Commanding General of the Saiyan Army. The title hadn't meant much when Nappa had outlived most of his soldiers but now that he'd been reunited with the warriors under his command, Nappa was a formidable enemy once more. And a political enemy as well. Vegeta didn't doubt that Nappa'd had a role in convincing the rest of the elite to disown their Prince.

Due to having been numb - inside and out - for hours, it took Vegeta a few stunned moments to realize that the attacks had stopped. What was left of his vision and ki detection abilities stubbornly refused to come out of hibernation but, abruptly, his hearing was working just fine.

The jeers and insults that had been directed at him were now replaced by an anxious, hostile growl. Shrill laughter and then... Deafening explosions. Warcries. The rumble of thousands of angry warriors charging through the air.

Over all the noise, Vegeta heard two hushed voices approach.

"Since when are you evil, Green One?"

"What's so evil about raising hell?"

The first speaker laughed weakly. "Uhm. You don't mean literally raising hell, right?"

"It's not a bad idea."

Vegeta winced as he was lifted. He would have protested it if he'd had the strength to. Being carried was not going to help his pride at all and it wasn't going to settle well with his broken bones either.

"You can beat up the Saiyan Army later." Someone told Vegeta cheerfully, "After Freezia and his clan are done with them." Then the voice continued in a serious tone that seemed to be directed more at the person carrying Vegeta and less at Vegeta himself. "Come on, we'll have to make use of the distraction while we can."

Bardock hesitated then swore under his breath and followed, mumbling. "Why weren't _our gods_ more like _that_ one?"


	5. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 5**

"Gods aren't supposed to interfere directly. Gods aren't supposed to interfere directly. Gods aren't..."

Mister Popo twiddled his thumbs, repeated his mantra and tried to ignore the fact that Kamis Lookout was on fire. It wasn't working very well. Mister Popo switched mantras, sounding a little more indecisive than frightened.

"Immortal doesn't mean invincible. Immortal doesn't mean - "

He'd been a warrior once. A hero of Earth and defender of mortals. Up until seventeen years ago, Mister Popo had been the second most dangerous warrior on the planet. Then the mortals had produced heros of their own - warriors whose power had exceeded even the gods - and like the rest of Earths population, Mister Popo had come to rely on them to solve any problems that arose. Of course, in the end he had outlived most of the mortal heros. The world might finally need him again.

He hesitated. Seventeen years wasn't long to a mortal - much less a god - but he'd given up fighting. It was against the rules now anyway. Even if Mister Popo'd thought he had a chance at victory, fighting was something that could earn him negative attention from higher ranked gods. Immortals weren't supposed to interfere directly with the fate of the world anymore.

Although... Rather a lot of the other immortals that Mister Popo knew were well on their ways to interfering directly.

" - invincible. Immortal doesn't mean..."

A wave of flame crept closer to one of the gardens that Mister Popo had patiently invested centuries into perfecting. The plants at Kamis Lookout were unique and not only in the sense of being able to survive at such high altitudes - each garden represented a different millenium. The garden currently endangered by the fire hosted plants that had thrived long before humans had dominated the planet. Plants that were now extinct almost everywhere else in the galaxy.

Behind him, the walls of Kamis palace crumbled further and a blast of warm air swept over the Lookout. Mister Popo could see the verdant leaves beginning to droop, the delicate flowers beginning to wither.

"Oh fudge it." Armed with a rake and a half-empty watering can, Mister Popo attacked the flames.

* * *

The world had been reduced to a colorful blur seen through a golden haze. Chaozu was not adapting well to the speed of their flight. The air was ripping past them so forcefully that it hurt to breathe. Lack of air clouded his ability to communicate so Chaozu reacted with pure psychic instinct.

Gohans aura flickered. The golden aura had been protecting them from anything they flew past - insects and birds became crispy critters instead of splattering against the warriors. Turning off the aura had the rather gross effect of converting Gohan into a human windshield.

"Bleah! Eck..." No longer in Super Saiyan mode, Gohan hovered and gagged on the unidentified thing - probably an insect - that he'd nearly swallowed. "Jeez! What'd you do that for?"

"Mostly so that I could breathe!" Chaozu matched Gohans tone of annoyance. "Not everyone has a set of lungs that can endure..."

A glittering blue-gold streak shot past them.

This time Gohan didn't even hesitate. He'd fought against the androids just enough to know that having one both in range and with its back to you was very rare, so he wasn't about to waste the opportunity. With his aura surging back into place around him, Gohan threw his hands forward - palms out and fingers splayed apart - as he unleashed an energy wave. "MASENKOU!"

* * *

"What in blazes?" Oolongs eyes widened as he saw what they were flying towards. The submarine was a true all-terrain vehicle. In addition to transversing water, it could fly as needed and could also be driven over land. "Is it just me or is the Lookout on fire?"

Kamis Lookout hung in low Earth orbit. From the ground it was often only visible as a tiny metallic glint. A shining silver dot in the western sky. Most people on Earth didn't even notice the Lookout and of the few who did, the majority believed that what they were seeing was a star bright enough to be visible during the day. Astronomers had discovered the truth ages ago but had wisely kept it to themselves. Sharing the truth would have raised a lot of awkward questions that the astronomers didn't have answers for. People would be bound to ask things like how had the Lookout gotten into Earth orbit in the first place? And just how long had it been up there?

"How can it be on fire?" Puar demanded as she glanced up from her side of the control panel. The Lookout was currently a very bright red dot in the sky. "It's in Earth orbit! There shouldn't be enough oxygen there for - "

Master Roshi stood behind the shapeshifters, leaning on his staff. "Might not be a natural fire." He pointed. "Look."

Beneath the crimson dot that was Kamis Lookout stood Korins Tower. At this distance the tower was little more than a tall thin white line with a rounded top standing out against the sky. To the casual observer, nothing seemed wrong.

"... So?" Oolong and Puar said in unison, scowling at each other after having made the comment together.

Master Roshi sighed. It was a pain being one of the only people on Earth old enough to remember the legends. "I'll explain later. Just hurry." While he spoke, he walked to the storage closet in the back of the submarine. Opening the closet revealed a set of spacesuits that Roshi had always kept handy on his all-terrain vehicles in case of emergency. "And shapeshift into something more humanoid, both of ya." Roshi instructed, "You'll each need to wear one of these."

Puars instant response was to take the shape of a middle-aged man with short blond hair and dark brown eyes. The man wore a formal business suit complete with a plastic ID card pinned to the lapel of his shirt.

"Hey!" Oolong exclaimed, "I didn't know that you were the sports announcer for..."

Puar shifted back to her cat form and smiled sheepishly. "I'm not." She said quickly. "Heh. Uhm. Let me try that again..."

* * *

Somewhere in East Capital City, a middle-aged man with short blond hair and dark brown eyes tried to figure out what had happened to his life. He didn't understand it. Everything had been going wonderfully until a week ago.

He was a sports announcer and a week ago he'd been broadcasting live coverage of a professional baseball game. Being a resident of East Capital City, he had supported the local team. Nothing wrong with that. Although this mans idea of supporting the team included insulting the visitors, sabotaging their supplies and bending the rules.

The hatred had come naturally to him since the rivalry between the East and West capitals of the world was fierce and ran deep. The cities were competative in all things. City officials saw every festival and sporting event as a chance to advertise their accomplishments, to essentially make their city seem better by making all the others look worse.

West Capital City had lost the baseball game. But at least one resident of East Capital City was paying the price for the crooked victory.

The man was sitting in front of a tv, shaking his head as he watched the recording that had been playing on the news and making tabloid headlines for the past few days. Members of the media were vigorously interviewing someone who looked just like him.

"I swear," The man said into a phone that he held by his ear, "that's not me! Why would I say something like that? No! No, I swear! Fired? But sir, my contract... Sir? Hello?"

* * *

Voices carried through the flames.

" - given up identity theft?" Someone was saying.

"Old habits die hard." Came the reply.

Mister Popo was a bit charred and more than bit scuffed up. His watering can had melted, his turban was smoking and the rake he held was burning at both ends. Despite all this, Mister Popo adopted a defensive stance. The Lookout being on fire wasn't going to prevent him from fulfilling his sacred duty to protect the place. He turned towards the voices. "Halt! Who goes there?"

"Popo-sama!" A bulky humanoid figure lurched through the flames, followed closly by two others. It took Mister Popo a few startled seconds to realize that he was looking at three people in heavily insulated spacesuits. Which was smart for mortals. Among other things, spacesuits were fireproof. "It's Kamesennin!" Roshi identified himself by his more formal title, shouting just to be heard. "We need to get to the room of..."

Mister Popo yelled something in a language that had gone extinct before writing had been invented. A violet carpet fringed in gold thread materialized under Master Roshis feet and lifted him, hovering six inches above the burning tile. In order to avoid being toasted, the carpet warped in and out of existence until it had collected all three of its passengers. "Carpet will take you there."

Obediently the carpet sped off towards the crumbling palace centered on the Lookout, ducking and weaving through the flames. "Popo-sama!" The figures called out as they were carried away, "What about you?"

_There's something left for me to do here._ Mister Popo thought. He waited, listening until he'd heard the unmistakable noise of a heavy door slamming shut before discarding his rake, walking to the edge of the Lookout and removing his turban.

Wedged amid the folds of the turban was a pale blue oval rimmed in gold. Mister Popo pressed on one side of the stone and eased it open, like a locket. Concealed within the stone was a tiny lever surrounded by an inscription that read: _give me a lever and I will change the world_.

And now even the casual observer would have had to admit that Korins Tower seemed a lot brighter than usual.

* * *

While there are many different kinds of psychic attacks, they all have one thing in common: style. Technique. All psychic attacks required concentration and a general idea of where the enemy was. Ideally, you had to be able to see or sense your target without being in danger yourself. Because it was easier to concentrate when your life wasn't being threatened.

Chaozu missed the days before people had been able to fly and shoot energy beams. Psychic attacks had been extremely effective back then and a whole lot easier to use too. While his attacks had not diminished in effectiveness, the ideal conditions for using the attacks were much harder to come by attack range was a major snag. Enemies that could level cities had such huge ranges that it was hard to get far enough away to feel safe. Chaozus truly devastating psychic attacks required so much concentration that he'd have to slip into a trance to launch them. Being entranced left him vulnerable. Thus Chaozu refused to use his psychic attacks if he doubted his own safety.

This was where the androids presented a special problem. Between moving too fast to be seen and lacking detectable ki, the androids were nearly impossible to keep track of. And if you didn't know where an opponent was then you wouldn't know whether or not you were out of their range.

Chaozu was flying in what he hoped was the opposite direction of the battle. With Gohan and Android 18 both fighting, the attack range that he had to escape was immense. Chaozu had a fair idea of where Gohan was - the kids energy signature was hard to miss - but Android 18s location was anyones guess.

_There has got to be a way to track them._ Chaozu dug into one of the pockets on his tunic and brought out the capsule that he'd captured Android 17 in earlier. _Hmmm. I wonder if..._

For the first time in his long life, Chaozu tried to read a computers mind. He was surprised that he didn't have to try very hard.

Scientists of the Red Ribbon Army had constructed the androids carefully, paying attention to detail. Every wire, every molecule, every computer code had been put into its assigned place. But there were some details that couldn't be built or programmed. There were some things that just happened. The androids had started out as an industrial project, a mechanical undertaking, an interesting experiment in DNA. But during the years that they had been under construction, the androids had gradually become something more. A form of self-expression. A masterpiece.

The androids had become art. And art had spirit. And spirit had brainwaves.

Chaozu grinned, changing direction. He could track brainwaves.

* * *

Kamis Lookout shuddered. The entire island pivoted to one side as the flaming mass began to tumble from the sky. The village below was covered in shadow and people looking up saw a crimson star that was growing rapidly in size, leaving a trail of smoke and burning debree in its wake.

The island flipped over once, twice, spinning out of control...

BOOM.

When the villagers gained enough courage to pull themselves to their feet and look up again, Korins Tower sat smoldering above a cloud of ashes that drifted harmlessly to the ground. The crimson star was gone.

* * *

"Oh my..." Mister Popo said. "It worked."

INDEED. Thought someone standing beside him. YOU DESIGNED IT VERY WELL.

Mister Popo blinked. "Thank you." When you'd known someone for over eight hundred years, you tended to forget what they were to the rest of the world. It was hard to think of someone as Death when you'd had them over to play cards twice a week. "I thought you only went to the deaths of mortals?"

I MAKE EXCEPTIONS FOR FRIENDS.

"Oh." Mister Popo smiled. No one had greeted the engineer at any of his previous demises. He'd always just filled out some forms and then sat around in heaven for a bit before being assigned to a new project on a different world.

Projects were always interesting. No matter what the construction resulted in - a valley of pyramids, a few giant stone heads or some primitive artwork carved into fields so that the giant picture could only be seen from above - immortal engineers enjoyed baffling mortals everywhere they went. These engineers specialized in creating structures that nature hadn't formed on its own and that mortals often couldn't explain, much less replicate.

A floating island complete with a palace, gardens, access to a few dimensional portals and a giant laser cannon underneath in case the island ever fell for example. Humans certainly hadn't built that.

Mister Popo scratched the back of his neck and sighed, privately wondering what planet he'd be sent to next and if there really even was a next. "They're loose you know." He said absently, "The prisoners of time. I couldn't prevent it."

I KNOW.

"They'll be after you eventually."

MMMM. Korin did his best to seem unconcerned which wasn't too hard for him because he'd had centuries of practice.

"Just be careful, all right?" Mister Popo persisted, "They've already got Feng."

I KNOW. After a short silence Korin vanished and reappeared. He held out a single potted plant. EARTH ISN'T YOUR RESPONSIBILITY BUT IF YOU'D LIKE TO HELP, PLEASE TAKE THIS WITH YOU.

Mister Popo accepted the plant. He'd always been fond of gardening. In his mind, gardening was just another form of engineering. "Do senzu work in heaven?"

ARE YOU GOING TO HEAVEN?

* * *

Heaven was no place for an assassin. Sure - heaven was nice and all but there was such a thing as too nice. Most dead people liked heaven. So if you'd sent them there, they thanked you for it.

"Best thing that ever happened to me!" An angel said enthusiastically, "Gave me a whole new outlook. Really put things into perspective, you know?"

"Erm..." Tenshinhan sought for something to say. "I suppose it would. By the way, have you seen...?"

"Yep, nothing like death to make you realize what counts." The angel continued, "Would have been nice if I'd realized it while alive, of course but ya can't have your cake and eat it too, eh?"

"Uhm. Right..."

The angel sombered, its wings drooping and its voice more wistful. "Did I tell you about my daughter? She made the best cake. Well. She tried anyway and that always made it taste better, knowing that she'd put some effort into it. Not like the stuff we've got up here - it's perfect and all but it just materializes, you know? It's not the same."

What Tenshinhan was rapidly discovering was that this was far worse than having the souls of people he'd killed upset with him. People had a right to be mad at him - he'd killed them, he'd expected anger. He knew how to deal with anger. Guilt... That was a little more tricky. "I'm sorry. I didn't know that you had a child." Tenshinhan said softly. Of course he'd been working strictly for an income back then. And his employers had rarely told him the entire story because assassins weren't supposed to care about the entire story.

"You killed me at work."

"Oh. Right." Tenshin managed to sound as miserable as he felt.

Without looking up the angel added, "I shoulda spent more time at home."

_Ditto._ Tenshinhan thought, although for him home hadn't always been a welcoming place and in the end he really hadn't had much choice in the matter. You couldn't go home when home wasn't there anymore.

While the angel sat lost in its own thoughts, Tenshin quietly walked away from it. He'd been dead for less than day - the wings and halo hadn't even arrived yet - and already heaven was starting to seem creepy. The only spirits he'd run into so far were people that he'd killed. He knew that he had relatives and friends up here somewhere, he just hadn't been able to find any of them yet. Tenshin was beginning to wonder if perhaps they were avoiding him. He was beginning to wonder if he should be in heaven at all, the place just made him uncomfortable.

The bottom line was that heaven was perfect and he wasn't.

There was a lot of difference between trying to save the world and actually saving it. Tenshinhan had always done his best to keep Earth intact but his best had never been good enough. In many respects he felt that he'd failed and worse, that maybe he'd never really had a chance at success. It was not an easy concept to live with and an even more difficult concept to die with. Death was so final now. There was absolutely no chance of making things better. No chance to...

Without any warning, a pillar of blue-white light tore upwards through the clouds as a wide laser beam impacted the piece of heaven that had the misfortune to be placed over Korins Tower. Angels shrieked as they dove out of the way and office demons rushed to make repairs.

A single spirit, engulfed in light, fell to Earth.

* * *

Before Freezias destruction of the Saiyan homeworld, if you'd said 'the entire Saiyan Army' then you would have been talking about every Saiyan alive. The entire population of Planet Vegeta plus a few battalions of soldiers that were scattered throughout space.

After all, the Saiyans had been a warrior race. Fighting skill had been their only real export, the only thing that the Saiyan culture'd had in abundance. The Saiyans had fought wars and conquered planets in exchange for technology, wealth, natural resources and anything else they'd needed. Military service had been mandatory. Every Saiyan had served in the Army. Refusal to serve had been viewed as treason and had resulted in public execution.

Thirty years ago, Freezia had personally taken care of Planet Vegeta. Soldiers loyal to Freezia had exterminated the various Saiyan battalions in space. All but four members of the Saiyan Army had been wiped out and one of those members - an infant - hadn't even been aware of the fact that he was Saiyan at the time. Nappa and Vegeta had been left alive on purpose. The survival of the other two had been something of a cosmic fluke. But now all of four of the survivors were dead.

The Saiyan Army had never been more dangerous.

Currently if you said 'the entire Saiyan Army' you would be talking about a massive collection of warriors in hell. Instead of talking about every Saiyan alive, you'd be talking about almost every Saiyan that had ever lived because only a handful of Saiyans had made it to heaven.

Upon arriving in hell, Prince Vegeta hadn't just been declared an outcast by his parents. He'd more or less been declared an outcast by the entire dynasty. Grandparents and relatives up to fifteen generations removed had collectively shunned him. Every generation was there. Most of the Saiyans that Prince Vegeta recognized had only been dead for the past thirty years but there were a large number of Saiyans in hell that had been dead for considerably longer than that.

And they'd all been training. There wasn't much else to do in hell.

Freezia and his father, King Kold, had only been dead for the past four years. Lord Enma had taken care to send them to a lower region of hell where the torture was worse.

Lord Enma was a bulky humanoid orge that was well over ten feet tall even when he was sitting down and everything in his office was built to his scale. This made it easier for Enma to intimidate his visitors. Most creatures - humans especially - were indignant about the whole process of being judged but Lord Enmas sheer size, to say nothing of his infamous temperment, tended to discourage their protests. If spirits ever got difficult then Lord Enma would simply pick them up and toss them out of his office.

Aside from wanting to punish Freezia sufficiently for his crimes against The Universe, Lord Enma had wanted to prevent Freezia and the Saiyans from clashing. Because if a battle started then Freezia would no doubt be joined by several of his own ancestors as well as members of his own army and other residents of hell who just plain disliked Saiyans. Both sides would be ridiculously strong and in hell, no one could die. So the battle would be pointless, unending, inconclusive. The fighting would just go on and on forever with more and more of the Saiyans reaching Super Saiyan levels even as Freezia and his kin discovered further power-boosting transformations of their own. It would be an eternal struggle. Unless...

A distant low rumbling shook the heavens, gaining in volume and intensity as it reached the clouds of Lord Enmas office. File cabinets rattled and smaller items fell over. Frowning, Lord Enma carefully set the fallen items back in their places one by one. Something was wrong. He could feel it in his bones.

"Oof! Excuse me... Pardon... Coming through..." As if on cue a dishelveled office demon scrambled urgently towards the doorway, pushing through the long line of spirits that were awaiting judgement. "Lord Enma! Sir!" The demon saluted as he made his report. "It's a bloody war down there, sir! The furnaces can't handle it - more power than the engines can absorb, it's overloading them! We've never seen anything like it, sir! All hell is breaking loose!"

Seated behind his desk, the giant scowled. His face coloring darker shades of scarlet as his anger grew. Being an office demon - indeed, being the king of the office demons - Lord Enma was extremely tidy and somewhat obsessive about organization. If all hell broke loose then it would be messy. Lord Enma did not tolerate messes.

"Idiot! Don't just stand there! Get the red tape!" Enma bellowed, "Go! Now!" Growling he pressed a button on his desk repeatedly, summoning more office demons. "We'll put a stop to this."


	6. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 6**

Android 18 stood in the sky, looking like someone who'd had a date with a flamethrower. Her denim clothing was ruined and the disagreeable odor of burnt hair clung to her. She hovered in the shadows of a skyscraper and scanned the cityscape warily. There was no trace of her usual smirk in her features.

The brat had gotten better. While he hadn't yet damaged anything but her pride and her wardrobe, Android 18 was alarmed by the marked improvement in the brats fighting style.

Yesterday the brat had been fighting blind, shooting multiple blasts in every direction with the vague hope of defending himself - just as all the other warriors had done when panic had gotten the better of them. Ninety percent of his attacks had missed. Android 18 hadn't even needed to beat the brat up very much because he'd worn himself out. But today... The tables had turned. The brat seemed to know where she was now, the brat could track her and as a result his fighting style had become about a thousand times more lethal. Android 18 didn't understand how the brat could have figured it out. She didn't have regular ki. All her computer programs said that the brat shouldn't be able to track her, much less defeat her.

Cursing, she ducked to the side and flew upwards - narrowly avoiding a thin stream of orange energy. Android 18 realized her mistake too late. The blast faded harmlessly. The brat had just been trying to flush her out into the open and the ploy had worked. 18 barely had a chance to raise her arms and block the first incoming kick.

She caught the second and third kicks with her midsection and kneecaps respectively, the second blow knocking her backwards while the third caught her kneecaps from behind hard enough to sweep her feet out from under her. If Android 18 had been standing on the ground, the third kick would have left her flat on her face in the asphalt but as things were, it had just changed the position she was hovering in.

Something connected forcefully with her back and sent her crashing downwards. _Now_ she was flat on her face in the asphalt.

"Not as much fun when you're losing, huh?" The brat said seriously. He was hovering somewhere behind her with his golden hair, blue-green eyes and not so much as a scratch on him. But the most eerie thing about the kid was the way he fought or rather, the way he didn't fight. The brat didn't taunt, he didn't smirk or grin, he didn't cut loose and obliterate everything - he didn't even pretend to enjoy the battle. Not even when he was clearly winning.

The brat had unspeakable amounts of discipline and from a strictly robotic point of view, 18 respected that. Discipline was a trait that very few non-robots had.

Palms flat, Android 18 pushed off the ground quickly. Turning as she regained an upright hovering position with her fists clenched, she scowled restlessly across at the brat. _How the heck is he doing this?_ She kept asking herself but her internal database didn't know.

"Why don't you leave while you still can." More of a command than a question. It was fairly obvious that aside from disliking fighting in general, the brat had no desire to take their battle further into West Capital City.

Android 18 inclined her head, glancing past the brat at the surrounding city. Just the place for her to vent. But she noticed the increasing determination in the brats stance and expression. He'd defend this place. The brat might be at full power - it was hard to be sure - but even so, Android 18 knew that he was holding back simply by keeping his temper in check. She couldn't afford to provoke the brat, at least not until she'd found a way to evade him again. She'd have to figure out how he was tracking her.

"Where is my Brother?" She heard herself ask. It seemed that the easiest way to escape defeat was to change the subject.

The brat regarded her thoughtfully for a moment without letting his guard down then said. "I'm surprised that you care."

Android 18 wasn't sure that she did care and decided to sort that out later. She remained silent, staring calmly at the brat - waiting for either an opening to attack or a better answer.

Eventually the brat turned away from her and said. "I killed him." He watched her intently for a reaction and when none came, he added. "Leave before I'm tempted to do the same to you."

It was a lie. She didn't have any proof that it was a lie but it just had to be. Android 18 refused to believe that anything - aside from her brothers own stupidity - could harm 17. And more importantly, she refused to believe that the brat would let her walk away if he were capable of killing her. The brat had to be bluffing.

Although... Maybe killing 17 had just tired the brat out a bit?

Robots weren't supposed to feel doubt. Heck, robots weren't supposed to be able to die. Android 18 was confused and frustrated by the unfamiliar emotions and concepts she was experiencing. And the confusion and frustration that she felt in reaction to everything else only added to her list of problems. Robots weren't supposed to be confused! Nowhere in her programming was a string of code that said 'feel confused'.

Though Android 18 had a mostly human body and a humanoid spirit, her brain was almost entirely made up of computer chips. 'Confused' did not compute.

Ignoring the barrage of error messages in her head, Android 18 summoned up a cruel smirk. "You can't be everywhere at once brat." She told him, hoping that at least that much hadn't changed. "And you can't protect anyplace forever."

She turned on her heels and flew away from the sources of her confusion.

Gohan watched her leave, wanting to make sure that she didn't turn and start to come back. He'd heard enough of Android 18s comments on fashion yesterday to know - and hope - that the world should be relatively safe for at least a couple hours while she shopped for a new outfit.

_All right,_ Gohan thought once Android 18 had been out of sight for several moments, _that was amazing. How did you track her?_

Nothing.

_Hey... Chaozu?_ Gohan had started to power down, he stopped. _Are you okay?_

No answer.

* * *

The Room of Spirit and Time was not a room. It was a dimensional portal that had been designed to look like a large room complete with a padded floor, high ceiling and four walls. The portal was magnificent piece of engineering. One Earth day outside the Room of Spirit and Time equaled one Earth year inside the portal. Mister Popo had added the 'room' to the palace on Kamis Lookout for the sole purpose of aging artifacts.

Every world had artifacts. Magical fans, shimmering globes of power, enchanted swords, various pieces of jewelry that improved certain skills - whatever. Artifacts came in all shapes and sizes but they only had one age. Ancient. There was no such thing as a brand-new artifact. Toss out a new trinket and it's just garbage. Dig up the exact same trinket a hundred years later and suddenly it has become a mysterious and sacred remnant of a past era.

With artifacts - and also good luck charms - what the object actually was didn't matter as much as what people _believed_ the object was. Mysterious powers came from faith and faith was something that came with age. Thus the older an artifact, the more potent its powers.

The Earth set of dragonballs had only been created around 306 years ago but if you wanted to be technical about it then, due to having been left in the Room of Spirit and Time for nearly two hundred years, the artifacts were currently 69,102 years old. Or at least they would have been, if Kami were still alive. And this was the reason that the dragonballs had only begun to see frequent use around seventeen years ago. As artifacts, the dragonballs hadn't held much clout until they'd been sufficiently aged.

The Room of Spirit and Time had never been designed for use as a training room and it certainly hadn't been meant to provide an escape route to the prisoners of time. The portal had miraculously withstood the strength of the few ambitious warriors who had decided to train there but the invasion of fugitives had proven to be too much. The illusionary room was gone.

Master Roshi had never liked flying. Traveling through the air in anything less substantial than a moderately armored vehicle tended to give him a severe case of vertigo. At the moment however, between dizzy spells, Roshi was immensely grateful for the flying carpet beneath him. Because from the looks of things, it was the only thing beneath him.

No walls, no floor, no ceiling. Just a vast boundless darkness. It wasn't a threatening evil sort of darkness and it wasn't the lonely empty sort of darkness either. It was just an alert darkness. This darkness was cultured, this darkness had texture. There was a certain unsettling degree of awareness to this darkness. Master Roshi stared out at it and was startled by the inexplicable sensation that somehow, the darkness was staring back at him.

"Don't. Touch. Anything." Roshi whispered to the shapeshifters. They were both crouched behind him on the carpet, still wearing their spacesuits and they nodded in muted terror. Eventually Roshi gathered enough courage to ask aloud, "Tempus-sama?"

Not even an echo replied. Yet it wasn't a silent darkness. There was a pulse to it, a faint ticking sound. Roshi paled when he discerned the noise. _Oh no..._

Time was out of tune.

* * *

_Oh great, NOW what?_ Gohan watched the western horizon with blended anxiety and annoyance. The sun was setting. According to Gohans watch it was only 10:27am. However Gohan wasn't entirely sure he trusted the watch anymore, the minute hand was moving backwards.

He wished that Chaozu would wake up but the small warrior cradled in his arms didn't stir. Gohan had found Chaozu laying unconscious on a sidewalk only a couple blocks away from where he'd been confronting Android 18. Gohan had actually seen Chaozu before sensing his ki - the pale warrior stood out, he was hard to miss. He was also, as far as Gohan tell, completely unharmed.

Gohan wasn't sure why Chaozu had fainted - he guessed that it was probably just a psychic thing - but the location had been lucky. If Chaozu had lost consciousness while hovering over a street, there probably wouldn't have been much of him left to find. _At least you're easy to carry._ Gohan thought as he made his way through the city, scanning the area for landmarks as he flew along. There wasn't a whole lot Gohan could do to prevent sunsets and he didn't care for the idea of getting lost at night. Gohan hadn't been to West Capital City often enough to be familiar with the area. He'd never needed to navigate the city before since he'd always come to the place with someone that knew the way.

Thankfully, Capsule Corp was a major economic power on the planet and that warranted the existence of road signs to indicate the direction of the company. Gohan flew at a pace that allowed him to follow the signs. So he was surprised when he arrived in front of a building he'd never seen before. It was a dome-shaped structure and it had the Capsule Corp logo stamped on it but it wasn't the Capsule Corp mansion.

A cluster of people in office attire and long labcoats stood at the main entrance of the building, holding a variety of scientific devices. Telescope, microscope, binoculars, calculator, thermometer, barometer, seismograph, windsock, compass, magnets, tape measure, digital clock...

The digital clock wasn't working.

"Hmmm." said a middle-aged man with short purple hair. "There are working batteries in it, right?"

"Yessir!" Replied half a dozen voices.

To demonstrate, the batteries of the clock were removed and placed into a different electronic device that worked perfectly as soon as it was turned on.

"What about the other one?" Dr. Briefs inquired.

A second clock was brought out and this one was analog, not digital. It had a round face and hands that were currently, with each tick, moving in opposite directions.

"Might be an eleborate prank." Dr. Briefs observed. "Might be a temporal disturbance. I'd say that deserves a day off."

The scientists of the Capsule Corporation factory cheered like children who'd just been told that school was canceled due to a pending volcanic eruption. It didn't matter that there was a disaster with nasty long-term consequences looming on the horizon, all that mattered was that they got the day off.

Privately even the Saiyan part of Gohans brain almost wished that he could enjoy the moment the way that normal people seemed to. But unlike most the rest of Earths population, Gohan felt he could - and therefore, should - do something about any pending disasters. He'd had a lot of personal experience with disaster after all.

While the Capsule Corp employees were tidying up and preparing to vacate the premises, Dr. Briefs noticed that the company had a visitor. He began to say that factory tours wouldn't be offered today then stopped himself. Gohan was standing on three feet of air, the boy obviously wasn't the regular sort of visitor.

Dr. Briefs removed his glasses, wiped them off on the sleeve of his lab coat and replaced them while desperately trying to remember Gohans name.

Gohan was having similar problems. "You're Bulmas dad, right?" He finally ventured.

"Everyone just calls me Dr. Briefs." The world renown genius almost offered out a hand for a handshake but he realized that it wouldn't work since the kid had his arms full. "You're ChiChis boy, aren't you?"

The demi-saiyan youth nodded. "My name is Gohan." Concern leaked into his voice. "What's this about a temporal disturbance?"

Behind Dr. Briefs, the employees of the Capsule Corp factory stood in a neat line while a manager did rolecall. Once they were positive that everyone was outside and accounted for, the building they worked in was capsulized. Dr. Briefs accepted the capsule and carefully placed it into special case which he then shut, locked and pocketed. People could try to steal anything they wanted from the Capsule Corp mansion - it was the factory that the Briefs were protective of.

"Seeya tomorrow Dr. Briefs!" More than one of the employees called out happily as they each went off to their vehicles.

Dr. Briefs smiled and shook his head. "Only if tomorrow comes."

* * *

Once upon a time, a long time ago, magic had been considered a valid occupation. There had even been schools for magicians to attend. The rest of the world would eventually call the students by titles like witch, wizard, warlock, mage, pagan, gypsy, astrologer, oracle, healer, prophet, sorcerer, shaman, fairy and elf but back then the students had all been just plain magicians. Back then all the various magical styles had existed without being stereotyped.

Back then, the schools had been visible. The process had been slow - so slow that barely anyone had noticed until it was too late to prevent - but each school of magic had gradually gained a distinct reputation, a personality. Each campus had become a semi-sentient being.

In some places people might sigh and say wistfully 'oh if only these walls could talk, the stories they would tell'. But people who said such things had obviously never held a two-way conversation with a wall. Walls were generally not tactful. Speaking with them could be both offensive and tiring.

The magic schools had prospered until the Industrial Age had come along and people fiddling with machines had claimed that there was a new kind of magic, a magic that anyone could use to explain anything. Science. It had taken the world by storm practically overnight. Self-empowerment had held a lot of appeal since people didn't trust each other anymore. People had wanted to rely on themselves instead of the local magician. Science had been exactly what they'd wanted to hear. Science told them to be independant, to question everything and to value progress.

Science had been the new magic in much the same way that humans had once been the new animals. When had science stopped being a sub-category of magic? When had humans forgotten that they were just another animal species? No one was quite sure when these separations had happened - evolution blurred the lines.

One step forward, two steps back. Despite the fact that anyone could use science, it was not a social magic. Creatures could only be so independant without also becoming competetive. Thus with the advent of science, society had gotten caught up in competitions. Science competitions. Most of the older magics had been forgotten and had faded away. Literally.

Over four hundred years ago, Lunar University had gotten its name for the design of its campus. The main buildings had all been painted white and arranged in a wide circle. Once the campus had gained consciousness, the buildings had gotten into the habit of changing their positions to reflect the current lunar phase. Lunar University had always been one of the most eccentric colleges. While many of the less diverse magic schools had faded from existence completely, Lunar University had adapted. The campus was only visible once in a blue moon but it had hung on.

Uranai Baba hoped that it had hung on, she hadn't had many opportunities to check on the University in recent times. Earths moon had been destroyed twice in the past seventeen years so seeing the moon at all had become a rare event - seeing a blue moon was practically unheard of. Still, she wasn't too worried. Other schools had drown in the wave of the future but Lunar University'd had enough sense to go with the flow.

The Capsule Corp mansion was a large two-story dome with a covered entrance, a shaded porch attached to the back and a rectangular gravity chamber sitting beside it. Even in the twilight it was obvious that the shadow which the mansion cast didn't match up to the physical structure. For one thing, the shadow had spires. Indoors, the effects of the localized variable magic field were even more evident. The Capsule Corp mansion was a huge maze full of more rooms and corridors than should have been able to fit in the building. Some of them, Uranai Baba knew, weren't technically in the building at all.

As soon as she had set foot inside the entry hall, her crystal ball had stopped being solid rock. Energy crackled around the orb with such force that crystal ball not only shattered, it disentegrated. Pale blue mist filled the air where it had been.

Uranai Baba cautiously lowered the arm that she'd shielded her face with and stared at the mist thoughtfully. She hadn't been looking into the crystal ball before it had exploded but a short series of projected images had reached her mind anyway. Uranai Baba was now aware that Kamis Lookout no longer existed. She was also aware that she had come for the wrong reasons.

She had come to Capsule Corp seeking access to Lunar University. She should have come to Capsule Corp just because it was Capsule Corp.

Unguided, she made her way through the halls with a sort of authoritive ease that not even the residents of Capsule Corp had. A small black cat followed her every step of the way. Uranai Baba went straight to the doorway of a room on the second floor and stood there, resting a hand on her hip.

"So." She said quietly, "You'll be the troublemaker."

A long painful silence followed while Uranai Baba contemplated her options. She didn't like her situation. Destroying infants was not her style, not even if the entire potential future was at stake.

She sighed and stepped forward, peering into the playpen that stood in front of her. "Don't suppose that I could get you to promise to never ride on any time machines, could I?"

* * *

" - So essentially, there are no true coincidences. _Everything_ has a cause and effect." Dr. Briefs walked into his house and spoke with the air of someone who'd given this lecture several times. "Basic fundamental scientific principle." Dr. Briefs smiled wearily and paused by the hall closet. He hung up his white labcoat with the Capsule Corp logo on it and promptly pulled on a plain white labcoat. "Funny how people forget the basics."

"Hilarious." Gohan muttered dryly. As if dealing with the androids hadn't been enough of a problem - now he had temporal distortions to worry about about. Mentally he was screaming. _I'm only ten! I'm just a kid! Why me?_

Dr. Briefs had offered to give him a ride home. Gohan hadn't ever flown home from West Capital City before - he wasn't positive that he knew the way - and so for lack of better ideas, Gohan had accepted the ride. Flying was only faster if you didn't get lost. However since the Capsule Corp mansion was much closer than the Son House, they'd opted to make a quick stop at Capsule Corp first. Dr. Briefs had needed to drop some things off and Gohan had hoped to find something that would wake Chaozu.

There weren't words for the sheer amount of concern Gohan felt. He didn't know Chaozu very well but that hardly mattered. Gohan had seen too many people die recently, he didn't want to lose anyone else.

"Welcome home dear!" Mrs. Briefs appeared in the hallway and embraced her husband. She was a tall slender woman with short blond hair and perpetually closed eyes, dressed in a formal ballroom gown and fluffy houseslippers. Mrs. Briefs was around 50 years old but if her role in early Capsule Corp commercials hadn't made her an easily recognized cultural icon then she could have passed herself off as a teenager. "How was your day at the office?"

"The world might be ending." Dr. Briefs said casually.

"That's nice, dear." Mrs. Briefs wasn't even phased. Possibly the end of the world was not an uncommon subject in this household. She glanced down at Gohan. "Awww. Cute doll."

A deafening shriek brought an end to the conversation in the hallway. Silence ensued for a few seconds then, sounding ever more like an air raid siren from an old war movie, the noise came again. This time the scream dissolved into giggles that were accompanied by a lower-pitched grumbling.

"MOM!" Bulma stomped into the living room adjoining the circular entry hall. Bulma was 34, she wore jeans and a tank top - both of which were tight fits. Her pale blue hair was tied back into a ponytail and the imprints on her face gave her the appearance of someone who had fallen asleep on a computer keyboard recently. "I told you NOT to buy Trunks anymore toys!"

Mrs. Briefs frowned, "Hon, I don't know what you're talking about."

"THIS!" Bulma held out a ninja action figure and the blond haired, blue eyed infant supported by her other arm reached for it. Bulma ignored him. "I didn't buy it for him! You expect me to believe it just magically appeared?" She snapped, hurling the action figure to the floor. "Mother, we've been THROUGH this. How many times do I have to tell you, he's never going to respect my authority if..."

Dr. Briefs leaned into the view of the hallway that Bulma had from the living room. "Bulma." He said simply. "We have guests."

She was too angry to care. "Well they're not MY guests!" She snarled.

Dr. and Mrs. Briefs exchanged sideways glances, aware of the irony. Bulma was constantly worried that her demi-saiyan son wouldn't have any respect for her since she wouldn't be able to match his physical strength. She wanted Trunks to learn respect for his elders - a trait which Bulma herself typically lacked.

In an attempt to ease the tension, Mrs. Briefs lifted the ninja action figure from the floor. "Never seen this one." She brightened. "Maybe his father got it for him."

"Pfft." Bulma rolled her eyes. "As if there's a Saiyan in existence that knows how to contribute to society without blowing something up." Trunks was pulling her hair, she scowled at the infant ferociously enough to make him let go and growled, "I swear, if you weren't a frickin endangered species..."

"Bulma!" Her parents exclaimed together in a tone of disapproval.

"Well it's TRUE! I didn't want..." Bulma began to protest, taking a step forward. Her view of the hallway widened and the sight caused her words to die in her throat. She spent a full minute mentally kicking herself. _Would have to be the only other demi-saiyan on the whole planet._

Eventually, somewhat calmed down, Bulma shifted Trunks to her other arm and sighed to break the awkward silence. "Sorry." She offered in a hoarse voice. "Bad day."

"Noticed." Gohan muttered softly, bristling from her remarks as if every single word had slapped him.

Silence.

"We were just leaving." Dr. Briefs said without making a move towards the front door.

Silence again.

"Vegeta is dead." Gohan turned towards the doorway, inwardly surprised at how blunt and detached he sounded.

Bulmas impulse reaction was to laugh. "Ha! Yea. Right."

Gohan just stared at her.

In more serious tones she hastily added. "He's gone all the time. You don't have to lie to cover for him." Shrugging, Bulma faced the stairs that lead up to her room. "And even when he's not gone, he's training. It would take..."

"An android." Gohan couldn't keep from sounding a shade indignant. "Vegeta is dead. I'm NOT lying."

"Even if he IS," Bulma still didn't sound convinced, "we'd just have to wish..."

Gohan interrupted her, shaking his head. "Won't work. Piccolo died too. Check the dragonball radar if you don't believe me."

Bulma stood very still for a moment then nodded and walked towards the stairs. "I'll do that."

As soon as she was out of sight upstairs, Dr. Briefs tapped Gohan on the shoulder. He looked intrigued. "An android?"

* * *

Lunar University was not the only sentient campus to survive into the Industrial Age. When humans had become obsessed with science, a few ingenius schools had opened their enrollments to all the other animal species. There had been some problems with language barriers at first but the animal students had proven themselves to be very fast learners. In fact the animals had been such fast learners that most of them were graduating from college by the age of seven.

Affectionately known as _Backasswards Ack_ among some of the more liberal students, the Shapeshifter Academy - initials SSA, which helped to explain the schools strange nickname - was the only magic school on Earth whose campus had stayed visible. Not that anyone who saw the Shapeshifter Academy recognized it. True to it's name, the school often changed its physical appearance and in recent years the campus had also begun to wander. The Academy had become steadily more exclusive simply because the place was so hard to find.

As far as personality went Shapeshifter Academy was perky, devious and had charisma to spare. Which was exactly what the campus had done. Lunar University had survived into modern times on its own. But the Shapeshifter Academy had brought a few notorious friends with it.

Nearly twenty-two years ago, Oolong had been a transfer student. The staff of the Shapeshifter Academy had appreciated his talent for biochemisty - what they hadn't appreciated was his skill for pulling off intricate pranks. After being expelled from the Shapeshifter Academy, Oolong had returned to his original college to complete his degree. He hadn't changed his behavior. Pranks earned extra credit at Voodoo U. Oolong had graduated with full honors.

An angry Super Saiyan and a degree from Voodoo U were two of the most feared things on planet Earth. Spiders and large needles would always be at the top of the list of common phobias - which was probably why the infamous school had always had both in abundance. Spiders and Large Needles had been a core class at Voodoo U. Enclosed Spaces had been an optional course but everyone planning to graduate had taken Spiders and Large Needles at some point.

Even the other magic schools had been scared of Voodoo U. It wasn't an evil place, it was just more brutal than average. The school motto had been: _it's never too early to start avenging yourself._

Like most of his classmates, Oolong had become a coward after graduation simply because he didn't have much courage left. Four years of study at Voodoo U was enough to use up a lifetimes worth of courage.

The humanoid pig wasn't feeling particularly brave at the moment but a certain discovery was prolonging the inevitable terror. "Hey..." He flexed the fingers of his spacesuit in surprise.

"Well of course you're still shapeshifted, ya twit." Puar muttered, sounding miffed. "Time isn't working properly. You'd KNOW that if you ever paid attention."

Usually Oolong could only hold a form for five minutes. Because he hadn't graduated from the Shapeshifter Academy, he'd just studied there for a little while. Puar was the one that had graduated from the Academy. She'd worked hard at her degree and the exclusiveness of her college had rubbed off on her a bit. In Puars mind, the very idea that some fluke in the timeline could make the two shifters equal in terms of shapeshifting ability was an insult to everything she had worked for.

"Jeez! It's not like it's my fault or anything!" Oolong countered defensively. "I didn't ask time to go haywire!"

"Wouldn't put it past you."

Oolong was offended. "That's ridiculous!"

"Kids! Can ya drop it? We've got the world to save here and I'm not..." Master Roshi paused then turned so that he could stare out of the helmet of his spacesuit at the other two spacesuits. Facial expressions were unreadable but the way Roshis voice had hitched seemed to catch their attention.

"What?" Oolong demanded.

"I was going to say that I'm not getting any younger." Master Roshi said slowly as the realizations dawned on him. He certainly wasn't getting any younger - he also wasn't getting any older. Yet. "But this is the Room of Spirit and Time." He paused for emphasis. "I've gotta get out of here before time is fixed."

Puar coughed. "... You can't mean to imply that you're gonna leave us to do the work?"

"Well," Master Roshi leaned forward, "do shapeshifters age?"

"Yes but we can shift into a younger physical body. So we never look like we age. Unless we want to." Puar shrugged.

"Must be handy." Master Roshi mumbled, wondering if the shapeshifters appreciated just how lucky they were. "Suppose you'd never have to go to a hospital either huh? Break a leg, shapeshift yourself a healed one. Bada-bing, bada-boom."

"The skill does have its merits." Puar agreed. Pointing towards Oolong, she added. "Won't fix mental problems though.

"Voice of experience eh?" Oolong retorted sweetly.

"Shut up, pig."

"Backatcha, scaredy cat."

"I AM NOT A..."

"Kids," Roshi sighed, "drop it. We DO have the world to save."

Two helmets turned towards him. "We?"

"Yep. You've convinced me. I'm staying so that things'll get done. Carpet?" Master Roshi gingerly poked at the fabric beneath his feet, wondering if the rug took orders from strangers. "We've gotta find Time."

The carpet went rigid for moment as if thinking deeply about this request. Then it warped out of existence, taking its three passengers with it.


	7. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 7**

The universe hosts an undisclosed number of inhabited worlds and on each of those worlds the beliefs were diverse. Gods of every imaginable form and purpose existed on more levels of heaven, hell and everything inbetween than can ever be accounted for. Yet as diverse as all the beliefs were, a common thread ran through them. Saiyans, Icejins, Nameks, humans and countless others all told the same basic story. If you took away the embellishments that each culture had added to their own versions of the tale, the universal myth went like this:

In the very beginning, nothing existed. No light, no color, no sound, no horizons - nothing. Just an empty boundless primeval darkness. And then, abruptly, there was One. Just One. A creature without shape because shape didn't exist yet. The essence of consciousness, a sudden spark of awareness. A lone mind hovering in the darkness thinking: _gosh, it's dark_.

It was often said that the One had unmatched power but that was self-evident and meaningless. Of course the One had unmatched power in the beginning! Nothing else had existed for it match its power against! As soon as other things had started existing, the One was no longer quite as formidable. One was never meant to be the greatest power anyway, it was just meant to be the first.

Eventually - out of boredom, loneliness and curiosity - One began to create things. Thus One became the very first immortal engineer.

Though the work was a good diversion, the creation of the universe was a large project and still a lonely one. Stars were nice for looking at but they didn't provide much in the way of companionship. Planets were just planets - barren chunks of rock floating around in space - not worlds. Nobody else was around to help or give advice. Nothing was there to say 'good job!' and the words didn't seem to mean very much when One said them to itself.

So One created the Two. The first beings to have shape. A male and a female or, in cultures that lacked gender, one aggressive and one passive. One would go on to put so much of itself into its main project that it merged with and became The Universe. Which left the Two to take on the task of creating More. While One had created the foundations - and sometimes also a handful of plants and animals - the Two were often best known for creating sentient lifeforms. People and immortals alike. Yet the Two had done so much more than that.

The Two couldn't help it. The Universe had been incredibly sensitive in its early stages, it had interacted with them on a daily basis. Everything the Two had said or felt or did created something. If they cried then rivers, lakes, waterfalls and oceans leapt into existence. If they smiled then flowers blossomed, suns shone and birds sang. That sort of thing. In addition to all this, the Two and their numerous offspring were in the habit of wandering around and defining things. So elements of nature suddenly had names and limits. Planets gradually became worlds, houses became homes.

Immortals became gods. They hadn't been gods before, they'd just been immortals and back then almost everything had been immortal so it wasn't anything special. It had taken the existence of mortals to make immortality seem divine by contrast.

From that point out, the universal myth became steadily more localized - the threads of some larger truth getting lost amid the details of cultural identity. Saiyans recited the story with Saiyan gods doing the things Saiyans valued, humans told it with human gods doing the things humans valued and so on and so forth across the universe.

But the universal myth continued on its own because you couldn't have a story that started _in the very beginning..._ without implying that somewhere, someday there might be a story that went _and in the very end..._.

Although, of course, when it really happened then nothing would be left to tell that one.

Stories of the apocalypse were typically pure fiction. They were also local. Apocalypse had come to mean _end of OUR world_ instead of _end of the entire universe_. Every inhabited planet had their own end-of-the-world story and quite a few worlds had suffered the misfortune of finding out just how inaccurate their stories were.

For example the Tsufurujin culture - and many other such cultures that were now mostly extinct - had not expected the end of their world to involve the Saiyan Army. Likewise, the bulk of the Saiyan culture would have never guessed that the end of their world would involve Freezia. Residents of Planet Namek had always predicted that violent storms followed by the explosion of one of their suns would bring the end of their world but a giant lizard and a Super Saiyan had destroyed their original planet instead.

The Universe didn't like to be predictable, it rarely did what anyone expected it to.

There were many end-of-the-world stories on Earth. Earthlings had good imaginations and so they'd covered most of the possibilities.

Humans had a popular story wherein a large comet collided forcefully with Earth, effectively putting an end to the planets existence. In variations of the story events such as wide-spread pollution, nuclear war, alien invasion, a previously unheard of terminal illness or any sort of drastic environmental change could essentially take the role of the large comet. For the humans who craved a more mythical version of the tale there was the classic story of four empowered horsemen - who happened to symbolize everything that nuclear war, hostile aliens, plagues, pollution and natural disaster were capable of - riding out across the world and causing mass destruction everywhere they went.

It was plausible enough. Aliens, horsemen, comets, war, pollution, plagues, disaster, destruction - any of these things could happen. Why not? They existed. They'd happened before. The potential for happening again was definitely there. It was just that other things could happen too.

No one knew for sure how The Universe might end because The Universe was not the sort of thing that gave two weeks notice before quitting. So actually there weren't any legends on Earth that mentioned the potential hazards of five relatively forgotten gods battling each other. In this respect the Earth was extremely fortunate - most of its gods weren't from Earth. So most of the gods of Earth had knowledge that went far beyond the legends of the planet that they watched over.

* * *

Planets blowing up is the sort of thing that traumatizes people, even if they're the ones blowing the planet up. However the trauma doesn't always change the person since it's too much for them to comprehend.

Humanoids are so emotional. They get outraged if their favorite television program is canceled. They have nightmares about petty things like spiders and large needles and wearing the wrong clothes. Blow an entire planet to spacedust right in front of them and their tiny humanoid brains can't even begin to absorb the shock.

Vegeta had grown up watching planets get blown to smithereens. As a result, he had spent most of his life terrified. In fact the term 'terrified' was a gross understatement but it would have to do since there wasn't a word in any mortal language that did justice to the emotion. Vegeta had never expected to live to age six, much less age thirty-five. Not that he'd admit as much to anyone - not even if there had been words for it. Death was disappointing him though, he'd hoped for a change of pace.

"I think he's coming around..."

The voice that had spoken was muffled by an irritating ringing noise that Vegeta was fairly sure nobody else could hear. He wasn't able to recognize the voice or place the direction that it had come from. He couldn't sense his own ki, much less anyone elses and he didn't even want to imagine how dreadful he must look. Vegeta felt as though his skeleton was currently eighty percent bone fragments. He wondered, in a mildly detached and morbid way, if 'bloody bruise' would be a good species name since apparently he wasn't officially a Saiyan anymore.

Vegeta slowly forced his eyes open - even his eyelids ached and burned - then growled in pain and glared out at the fuzzy world. Once things stopped spinning enough to come into focus, he saw that there was a green blur and also a tan blur with small dark spikey blurs on top hovering above him.

"Acahrot ick ats ou, e swar..." The Prince began indignantly. His speech was slurred and he winced at the sound of his own voice.

"Wha...?"

"I believe he said _'Kakarott if that's you, I swear...'_." The green blur translated.

The tan blur with small dark spikey blurs on top recoiled. "I don't look THAT much like him, do I?"

The green blur chose to ignore that question for the time being. "Relax, Vegeta." It tried to sound soothing instead of worried, "This is Bardock and he won't attack you again, he only did it to cure you."

Bardock nodded and spoke in an apologetic tone. "There aren't healers down here. Trust me, I know. So to get better, first you have to make it worse. It works because hell won't let you die."

"... don't... FEEL... better." By focusing on how annoyed he was, Vegeta managed to ignore most of the pain he was in and almost sounded coherant. This momentary numbness faded as soon as he made the mistake of trying to sit up.

"No. You probably don't." Bardock agreed calmly, "It doesn't heal you completely - just enough to let you really feel the pain. After all, this is hell."

Anger was another wonderful pain-killer. "THEN WHY DID...?"

The words died in midsentance because Vegetas brain reminded him rather sharply that he wasn't technically capable of moving. A fresh explosion of agony raced through what was left of his nervous system and somewhere on the fringe of his clouded perception, Vegeta was dimly aware of a scream and a flash of white-hot energy. He wasn't sure if either were his.

When the pain finally receded again, Vegeta didn't have to open his eyes to know that he was shaking all over and that something or someone was holding him down. There was a weight against his shoulders and something had grabbed both his wrists.

"Shhh. Hang in there, okay? We'll get you out of here." The green blur was still trying to seem reassuring but its voice was laced in doubt. "We might need you to be able to stay conscious for a bit though. All right?"

Vegeta didn't answer. He doubted that consciousness was such a good thing anymore. Pain gnawed around the edges of his awareness until sheer exhaustion settled in. When the impulse became too strong to resist, Vegeta relaxed enough to drift off into a fitfull sleep.

After a few moments Bardock released the Prince and sat back, crouching down distrustfully as if he expected Vegeta to have another violent seizure at any second. "Maybe we should let 'em rest a while?" Bardock suggested in a whisper.

Kami also sat back, clearly shaken. He nodded then flinched when he noticed the smears of blood he'd gotten on his white robe - Vegeta had lost a lot of blood recently and he still wore most of it. Kami hated to see others in pain, especially kids. And to Kami everyone under the age of two hundred was a kid. He often wondered why he hadn't been a healer instead of a warrior. But not that often. Kami had always known that he'd need to fight again someday. He hadn't exactly been looking forward to it either.

Still. Even without the healing ability, there was something he could do. The Namekian god of Earth closed his eyes and concentrated. The air around Vegeta blurred with colorless energy that gradually became more solid. By the time Kami opened his eyes, the Saiyan Prince looked like something that had been stolen from the depths of a pyramid. Vegeta was wrapped from head to toe in thick cloth bandages.

"Neat trick." Bardock commented.

Kami shrugged. He hadn't made use of any of his Namekian abilities in eons so it was taking him a while to recover. But all Nameks could cause cloth to materialize out of thin air, it was just part of their heritage. On Namek-sei there hadn't been much else to make cloth from.

They were sitting on the square floor of a narrow glass cube that was moving steadily downward, sometimes diagonally. Heaven had stairways but hell had elevators and this was one of them.

Kami had been visiting hell for the past three hundred and ten years. Bardock had been a resident of hell for the past thirty years. Between them, they had seen less than a quarter of hell. Right now, they were making up for it. There were countless levels of hell and the glass elevator was descending through every layer. It was all that they could do to ignore the sights and sounds outside of the elevator. There was stuff out there that would have made Vegeta seem healthly by comparison.

Bardock wrapped his arms around his kneecaps and closed his eyes. He hadn't known that it was possible to miss the level of hell that he'd been living on. "How much further?"

"Not sure." Kami did his best not to shudder at the thought of their destination.

Walls of fire, caverns of ice, bubbling swamps. Horrible tortures. Ugly demons, dangerous monsters. Whips, chains, cold coffee, spiders, large needles, paperwork, bloodstains, bad smells and screaming. That was the kind of thing most mortals thought of when they thought of hell but the original hell had been created before mortals and their stereotypes existed. The original hell was, to borrow a phrase, the real thing.

Kami had been there once before, to visit someone.

* * *

A small white oval arced through the air. The capsule fell to the floor, bounced once and exploded in a flash of light that was accompanied by the soft hissing noise of air escaping the container. A shape that hadn't been there before hovered above the floor.

Android 17 turned just in time to see a heavily reinforced door slam shut. He was, by now, frantic. Being capsulized had not been a pleasant experience. It made you feel... Alone. So very alone. Nobody heard you if you were inside a capsule. Nobody saw you. Nobody screamed and ran away in terror. There was nothing to do in a capsule, no reason to even exist. You were just a solitary speck struggling uselessly against the web of your own insignificance.

It took every ounce of discipline Android 17 had to resist the urge to attack the door while screaming that he didn't want to be left alone anymore. There were humans out there, he knew. He could sense their energy. It wouldn't do to go showing emotions around humans because emotions made you vulnerable. Robots weren't supposed to have emotions.

_It's got to be a programming error._ 17 tried to assure himself but even his mental voice was stammering.

Programming errors were another strictly human thing. Android 17 didn't like to remind himself that he'd been built by people because it made him wonder what they might have messed up. Kami forbid but what if they'd forgotten something important? He'd only been activated for seven days now, it was too soon to be sure that everything had been put together right.

The word 'Kami' caused so many syntax errors that 17s computerized brain threatened to shut down. He wondered where on Earth he'd heard that word anyway and decided that it must have been something his victims had used yesterday.

He was alone inside a windowless room. The walls, floor and ceiling were extra thick - _Soundproof._ 17 thought - and the only decorations were scattered burn marks and numerous dents. There was one door. A small computer console was set into a panel on the wall next to the door.

Above the console was a digital screen that currently read '0 g'.

_What the...?_ Android 17 had the sinking feeling that he was about to find out.

He was right. The numbers went straight from '0 g' to '10 g' which dragged 17 to the floor with a metallic clang. No more hovering. Simply standing up was a challenge. The humans were using a computer against him! Android 17 had never felt so betrayed in all his life - nevermind that he'd only been alive for a week.

As he was trying to aim an attack at the treacherous computer, the numbers jumped again. Straight from '10 g' to '20 g'. So much for standing up.

* * *

Outside of the gravity chamber, Gohan hovered near Dr. Briefs shoulder. It was dark outdoors so Gohan was using his orange aura in the same way that normal people used flashlights. "Did Vegeta know that you had a remote control?"

"I think he knew." Dr. Briefs said. Then he blinked and glanced towards Gohan. "Don't get me wrong, I didn't use the remote against him."

"Oh?" Gohan sounded relieved.

"See this alarm? It lets me know whenever the gravity gets above three hundred and fifty in there." Dr. Briefs shook his head and smiled ruefully. "Vegeta might have been able to handle more pressure than that but the computers couldn't. Had to turn the system off before the parts melted."

The first gravity room that Dr. Briefs had ever built had come with a top setting of 100g. Goku had put the design to the test four years ago, on his way to Namek-sei, and the spaceship containing the gravity room had held together just fine until the planet had exploded.

At Vegetas less than subtle request, Dr. Briefs had built the second gravity chamber - which was the one that he and Gohan were beside now. Dr. Briefs had improved the design so that the computers could withstand 200g and then had upgraded it again, to withstand 350g.

Dr. Briefs was reluctant to take the gravity room beyond 350g. The potential health risks of such intense training far outweighed any benefit that Dr. Briefs could conceive of. Not to mention that it would also be a huge expense to research, discover and construct materials that could withstand 400g for long periods of time. Plus there were the side effects to the surrounding area. You couldn't just suddenly cause localized gravity changes without having side effects to the surrounding area. For example, the gravity room was sitting at the center of a deep crater. It hadn't always been.

Vegeta had frequently claimed that the gravity room broke too easily. But Dr. Briefs was a world renown genius. Nothing that Dr. Briefs built broke unless that's what he had designed it to do. So the gravity room had never really been broken, it had just gotten shut off by remote control.

"And the further away I could be when the gravity room shut down, the less likely I was to get yelled at by a certain warrior." Dr. Briefs finished.

"Aha." Gohan admired the remote control then became anxious again. "Errr... Does Bulma have one of these as well?"

Dr. Briefs thought about that for a few moments before he answered. "I suppose she might." He admitted. "Remotes aren't that hard to build." His fingers lingered over the buttons. "Now then. How well constructed is this android? Is 20g going to be enough to make it short circuit?"

"I don't know." Gohan sighed. "Yesterday they took everything I could throw at them in Super Saiyan mode."

"Really? Hmmm." Dr. Briefs hesitated. "They wouldn't happen to have been made by the Red Ribbon Army, would they?"

"How'd you guess?"

"Androids are not the sort of thing just anyone can build." Dr. Briefs said, pressing some buttons. "I keep track of my competition."

* * *

The universe is filled with galaxies. Absolutely bursting with planets. Beyond billions of them. Worlds where you could watch three sunsets at once and worlds where there were no suns at all. Worlds where the grass was naturally neon purple and worlds where the oceans were naturally filled with skim milk. Worlds where the gravity was so intense that the tallest thing on the planet was the dirt and worlds where the gravity was so relaxed that trees grew in midair.

The universe was a vast, vast place. Anything that could be imagined - and quite a few things that couldn't - had its place in existence.

Which begs the question, why Earth? Why should any of the gods take a special interest in Earth, of all planets? Why should Death incarnate choose to reside on Earth? Korin could have lived anywhere. Why Earth?

It was a little known fact that Earth was one of the youngest inhabited planets in existence. Older worlds lacked the energy and charisma that Earth seemed to radiate. Being younger, Earthlings were a tad more openminded than several of their alien peers - which afforded creatures like Korin a broader spectrum of influence.

On almost any other world, Korin would have been plain old Death. No hobbies, no friends, no imagination, no sense of humor. He would have still had a family but it wouldn't have been the same. Which, in retrospect, might have been a good thing.

When the Two had created More, Death had been one of the concepts brought into existence. Four other concepts had been born at around the same time. Being the eldest of the batch, Death had swiftly been entrusted with the care of his four siblings. Technically Death had tons of siblings - he was related to all the other offspring of the Two - but in his own mind, Death felt most attached to the four he'd grown up with because he knew them better. He'd raised them, kept track of them, lived close to them. The nickname Korin had been a gift from one of his siblings. Feng.

Mister Popos words replayed in Korins mind. "Just be careful all right?" The engineer had said, "They've already got Feng."

_Feng._ Korin shuddered as he darted across the astral plane, on his way to greet another dead soul. _They would have to get Feng._

With so many mortals dying already, Korins paws were effectively tied. He couldn't abandon his duties - not even to warn his other siblings of the pending danger. Still, Korin had done everything in his power to make sure the others found out.

* * *

"Ugh..." Chaozu blearily rejoined the world of the conscious. Upon opening his eyes, he tensed. He was wrapped in a blanket and curled up on a very comfortable couch but the room wasn't familiar.

Usually it wouldn't have been much of a task for Chaozu to just look at someones mind and figure out what the heck had happened. But something in this room was different.

Humans have limited perception ranges. The best example of this is the accurately named dog whistle. The whistle makes a sound - dogs can hear it - but the average human can't hear it because the sound isn't in their hearing range. Taste, sight, touch, hearing, smell, energy detection - humanoids had very definite ranges for all of these senses. Anything too far above or below the range would be imperceptible.

Chaozu was a god and as such, he lacked a limited perception range. He could detect things that even Saiyans and Nameks wouldn't notice. Like variable magic fields. Without sitting up Chaozu pinched the bridge of his nose, pulled the blanket over his head and tried to figure out how he'd ended up at migraine central. "Ugh..." It was all that Chaozu currently felt like saying. He felt as though he'd been attacked by a hockey team armed with sledgehammers. Variable magic fields and overly sensitive psychic talents were not a good combination.

Someone poked the blanket. "Hey, are you alive under there?"

Chaozu was tempted to ask if they could check back later but instead he pulled the blanket down enough to see who was speaking to him.

"Why'd you faint?" Gohan wondered and Chaozu realized that being tense had probably made his ki spike enough for the demi-saiyan to take notice.

"Delayed reaction." Chaozu grumbled cryptically.

"...reaction to what?"

_Yesterday._ Chaozu thought but he knew that answer wouldn't make much sense to anyone mortal and he didn't particularly care to explain.

Chaozu was saved from having to think of a reply by the appearance of Bulma. She looked like she'd seen better days. For a few moments Bulma just stood in the doorway with the dragonball radar clasped tightly in one hand, scowling at the world in general. She radiated enough anger to make Gohan drop into a more defensive stance. Chaozu was half-expecting her to power up and go ballastic.

Instead she stepped forward and spoke, choking on the words in her outrage. "An android?" Bulma twitched. "A ROBOT? Why didn't someone come to get ME?"

"We didn't know what we were up against until we got there." Gohan explained as calmly as he could manage. "And by then it was too late."

Bulma wasn't listening. "But I could've taken that stupid hunk of metal apart and..."

Gohan interrupted her rant. "You still can. Chaozu caught one. Your father's got it trapped in the gravity chamber."

"My father?" Bulma snorted as she stomped quickly through the room, headed for the back door. "He wouldn't know a parabola from a hyperbola! How could you leave him with an android?"

Chaozu blinked. "A what from a what?"

"Math talk." Gohan informed him.

"Oh."

Bulma stopped at the edge of the room and pivoted on her heels. "Who else is dead?" She demanded.

"Vegeta. Piccolo. Kami. Krillen. Yamucha. Tenshinhan. Yajirobe." Gohan sighed wearily, sounding increasingly distant as the memories replayed in his head. "Oh, and a girl named Videl. And a lot of other people too but I don't know their names..."

"If you have an atlas," Chaozu added helpfully, "you can bring it up to date by erasing South Capital City."

Bulma stared at them both in disbelief while the weight of these words tried to sink in. "You've got to be kidding."

"We're not." Chaozu said.

"You mean, you two are IT? All the other fighters are..."

"Basically."

"Oh wonderful." Bulma growled, her voice full of sarcasm. In addition to not believing that a ten year old boy and a weird midget could survive anything that had defeated Vegeta, sarcasm was one of Bulmas coping skills. Talking aloud was one of her other coping skills. As she was stomping outdoors Bulma muttered the first random thing that came to mind. "What the hell was Yajirobe doing there anyway?"

* * *

Amid the clouds of heaven...

_What the hell was I doing there anyway?_ Yajirobe wondered.

Sure, he was about eight hundred times more dangerous than the average person and a trained samurai on top of that but he didn't often turn up for fights. Yajirobe had better things to do with his life and besides, his presence wasn't usually needed. And that was fine. Yajirobe had been perfectly content to stay out of battles. He felt too old to save the world and too young to die and...

He hadn't been heartless though. He'd known the risks when he'd left the tower. But what else should he have done? Yajirobe had no problem with staying out of the battles when the other warriors were winning but he wasn't about to stand by and let his friends get slaughtered. Even the ones that weren't really his friends, he wasn't going to stand by and let anyone defending Earth get slaughtered. He liked Earth too much.

Still, Yajirobe hadn't intended to fight. That was just common sense. What was he supposed to do against something that had already killed Vegeta?

Yajirobe was not a coward. He was Deaths best friend for crimineys sake, that wasn't the sort of title any coward could earn. Yajirobe simply lacked both the self-confidence and the raw power to honestly believe that he could make a difference anymore. So all that Yajirobe had been trying to do yesterday was deliver both senzu beans and an important message to the other warriors. He'd just had the misfortune to cross paths with the androids first.

He had lasted about five minutes against the robotic menances. He'd spent four and half minutes being insulted and then had come thirty seconds of anguish. The next thing Yajirobe had known, his spirit had been outside of Lord Enmas office. Waiting in line to be judged.

Yajirobe wouldn't have been comforted to learn that most of the other android victims hadn't fared any better. Quite a few had fared worse.

_Could have at least given me a warning._ Yajirobe thought at the mental image of his best friend.

And then he admitted to himself that no, Korin really couldn't have given him a warning. Because if Korin had warned him then he wouldn't have left the tower and the timeline would have been changed or something like that. Everything happened for a reason. If he was dead then he was meant to be dead... but...

_WHY?_ He just didn't understand it. Yajirobe suspected that the message he'd been told to give the other warriors had something to do with the reason for his being dead. But Korin had been speaking in riddles lately. Knowing the message and knowing what it actually meant were two completely separate things.

Yajirobe surveyed the vast gold-tinted cloudscape and tried to pick out the familiar energy signatures. He knew the message. Maybe they'd know what it meant.

* * *

The glass elevator sank into darkness. No fire, no ice, no swamps. No chains or whips or blood or large sharp objects or ugly monsters or screaming. Just darkness. Sheer, utter, horizonless darkness.

Bardock blinked. "This...?"

Kami nodded.

Due to his being mortal, the concept of the original hell was somewhat over Bardocks head. "But...? This is IT? Are you sure?"

"What do you see out there?" Kami said quietly, pointing with his wooden cane.

Bardock stared at the darkness for a while, trying to see something in it. Then he shook his head. "Nothing. Just darkness."

"But how do you KNOW that it's darkness?"

Now Bardock was staring at the Namekian god with increasing levels of horror and understanding.

"You recognize the darkness outside because it's also inside. Behind the eyes." Kami murmured as he stood up. "Existence is the original hell."

It was also the most personal hell and one that nobody ever truly escaped from, not even immortals. There was darkness inside and there was darkness outside. To escape both at once would require a creature to stop existing. And if you had to cease existing, then did it really count as an escape?

_I've been running too long._ Kami told himself firmly. He'd been over the plan in his mind a hundred thousand times. He had to do this - he was the Kami of Earth after all and Earth needed him now more than it had in a very long time. He wasn't about to let the planet down.

Without further hesitation, Kami spoke. "Either protect Vegeta or wake him up but don't just sit there. And don't be afraid either if you can help it, the ones down here feed off other peoples fear."

Bracing himself, Kami resolutely pressed a button and allowed the elevator doors to slide open. He shouted into the darkness. "DAIMIO?"


	8. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 8**

It was another starless night over the charred remains of South Capital City. A breeze shuffled through the ruins, whispering wordlessly as it brushed against the remains of the disaster then gaining momentum, howling, rushing upward. The wind lifted the veil of smoke that hung over the city and peeled it back so that the sky was clear.

Countless stars shed their faint light onto the scene. Then several of the stars moved. They were not as far away as they looked, not stars at all. They were medium sized spheres of light floating in a wide circular formation on the breeze. There was a pinkish tint to all of them.

A burst of flame at the center of the circle illuminated the edge of a shape. A very large shape that cast unusual shadows before the flames died. The creature moved with such grace and silence that only a ghost would have noticed it.

One did.

* * *

_How can something that size not leave footprints?_ Tenshinhan drifted back from the eerie scene, hoping that the creature wasn't also a ghost. If it was a ghost, it might be able to see him and that was the last thing he needed right now.

Tenshin had been dead once before, four years ago, but the circumstances had been much different. The gods had sent him to train with King Kai - for all the good that had done him in the end - and so he'd been allowed to retain his energy attacks without any discomfort. Tenshin was fairly certain that he could still use his energy attacks if he wanted to. But at the moment, he was pure energy. Using his attacks would kill his lifeforce and his lifeforce was, essentially, all he had.

He simply couldn't risk it. The fall from heaven had already taken a lot out of him.

It was a bit unsettling, being see-through. It was even more unsettling because it hurt. Whoever had come up with the term 'phantom pain' had probably not been aware of how accurately named the condition was. Tenshin was a ghost yet he had the distinct impression that he was bleeding and everything ached. Strange, what the mind was capable of. Some part of Tenshinhans consciousness was stubbornly insisting that he must still have a physical body.

He did, sort of. There was a pile of bricks - Tenshin was fairly sure that it had been a house before he'd been slammed through it - that he couldn't wander too far away from. Some invisible force wouldn't let him leave the area. He was essentially anchored down to what he guessed must be, somewhere under the debris, his physical corpse. Not a pleasant idea but it was what made sense.

_Thirty-four._ Tenshinhan sighed. Assassins rarely made it into their thirties, he'd outlived the statistical average by over ten years. These facts failed to comfort Tenshin. He simply couldn't think of himself as old. He'd been in the prime of his life until yesterday. He could have easily lived to a real old age - if only he hadn't died. _So much left undone._

Even more than his phantom pains and regrets, what was bothering Tenshin was the view. Yesterday there had still been some buildings standing. Yesterday he'd been flying and moving very fast. South Capital City had been a blur seen from a distance. A few fires, a few piles of large rocks that had looked out of place. Nothing very traumatic.

Now he was seeing the details. The pile of bricks was covered in scattered evidence that it had once been a house. Broken sections of furniture poked out of the debris. The occasional piece of half-buried clothing fluttered in the breeze. Bits of carpet, tile, pipe, wood, wire and glass sat among the bricks. The ground was littered with pots and pans and photographs and toys and roof shingles and... Everything that a house would have had.

Except people. Tenshinhan spent a few idle moments hoping that if anyone had been in the house, they'd gotten away. But one glance at what was left of South Capital City and he had to doubt that anyone had gotten away.

There had to be someone alive somewhere though and somehow, he had to reach them. He had to warn them about the androids. And he might as well try to warn them about the large creature and the strange orbs of pinkish light too - he just had a bad feeling about those.

Tenshinhan decided that Chaozu was probably at their home and thus too far away to reach. Telepathy functioned in much the same way that mobile phones did - ninety-eight percent of the world was always out of your calling range. It worked differently for immortals but Tenshin had never become aware of the fact that his best friend was an immortal since it was considered poor etiquette among assassins to ask about anyones past. So he'd never bothered to ask Chaozu anything personal and Chaozu had graciously returned the favor.

_Guess I'll just have to be careful._ Tenshin was fairly sure that being visited by the ghost of a complete stranger - and him being triclops, no less - would be enough to scare any person alive. And he didn't want to scare people because they weren't as likely to listen to him if they were busy running away.

Tenshinhan hovered beside part of the brick pile that had a bent weather vane sticking out of it. He began to search for energy signatures in the surrounding area. If any living humans had been nearby, all they would have noticed was that the weather vane squeaked as it swung on its axis and that the breeze moving it was headed north.

* * *

The trouble with being an absolute fashion perfectionist is that once you find an outfit that really works, nothing else lives up to your standards.

Android 18 was currently raiding a top-of-the-line fashion outlet on Brittle Avenue in Central Capital City.

It must be mentioned that the street was completely deserted and so were all the stores. Not that Android 18 cared. Even if she'd had money, she didn't intend to pay for anything so she didn't need cashiers or salespeople. If anyone had been there, she would have viewed them as targets.

There were plenty of clothes available, that's what mattered. Most of the clothes even fit. But so far nothing that Android 18 had tried on had managed to look as good as her original denim outfit. Nothing else could compliment her figure, bring out her eyes and let her blend in while also radiating the whole tough-girl attitude. Style aside, denim was just practical. Denim wasn't too revealing or itchy or uncomfortable. Denim wouldn't wear out easily in a fight.

Replacing her original outfit was not going to be easy. Not just because Android 18 was extremely picky but because the store - and its contents - had been designed by humans. Which meant that everything was laid out in the most impractical, unorganized manner possible. Finding anything worthwhile was going to require some effort. Frustrated by the inconvenience, Android 18 resolved that the brat was going to have a very short lifespan. She wasn't in the mood to mess around with destroying places at random anymore. As soon as she had a new outfit, she'd have to pay the brat a visit. At home.

Seventeen years ago, a little boy named Goku had single handedly demolished the Red Ribbon Army Headquarters. However he had, for the most part, only been fighting against soldiers. And the Red Ribbon Army had always been more than just soldiers. Goku hadn't been aware of that. Not many people on Earth had been aware of that. The scientists of Red Ribbon had always kept low profiles since most of their experiments were illegal.

Building androids for example, required both digging up corpses and cloning human DNA from live people to fill in whatever had decayed on the corpses. Very illegal. Also, interestingly enough, this would be why Androids 17 and 18 looked like twins. They weren't related and they never had been but they'd both gotten filler-DNA from the same person.

More importantly though - this was why Androids 17 and 18 did in fact have a short list of addresses stored in their memories. Goku had still been alive back when the androids had undergone the programming phase of their construction. The scientists of the Red Ribbon Army had initially armed the androids just so that they'd be able to defend themselves and do some useful industrial chores. Then the grudge against Goku had been remembered and, almost as an afterthought, the androids had been given some targets.

Hence Android 18 knew exactly where Gohan lived. And if for some reason Gohan wasn't at home, there were eight other addresses that she could check. _I'll just have to destroy all of them._ With a wicked little smile, Android 18 continued searching the clothes racks.

Android 18 found herself feeling that it didn't matter if her brother was gone - obviously, she could live without him. But, to put it simply, she couldn't live without herself. And she wasn't ready to let some annoying brat put an end to her. Her most recent plan was devestatingly simple. She didn't necessarily have to kill the brat, she just had to take away all his reasons for living. If she was thorough enough, he might even end up killing himself. Yes. It was a perfectly functional plan. There was currently only one flaw in it. A flaw that perhaps Android 18 would have been aware of if she'd been alive for more than a week.

There was no Brittle Avenue in Central Capital City.

While Android 18 went about her scheming and shopping inside the fashion outlet store, the entire avenue shuffled off very quietly. Taking her with it. Occasionally, as it wandered off towards the ocean, the buildings on the deserted street would blur and flicker. One moment looking exactly like a street full of assorted small businesses, the next moment a neat row of colorful beach houses.

Inbetween flickers the rare passerby might catch a glimpse of an ancient castle fortress with the words _don't believe your eyes_ engraved on the stone archway over the huge wrought iron gates. Because by sheer unwitting chance, Android 18 had entered the most elusive structure on the planet. The Shapeshifter Academy.

* * *

Gohan sat on the floor, leaning back against the couch. He wore an expression of grave concern. Chaozu had explained to him that the androids could be tracked by brainwaves. Gohan couldn't track anything by its brainwaves - nor was he eager to learn how. He didn't like to think of his enemies as capable of thinking. Believing that enemies were mindless made them a bit easier to fight and destroy.

"Why is it dark outside? I wasn't unconscious all that long, was I?" There were several alarms going off in Chaozus mind but he couldn't make sense of them, he still had a headache. The variable magic field had dampened all his psychic abilities.

"The sun set earlier this morning. We're not sure about the time, the clocks are all acting strange." Gohan said absently. "Dr. Briefs thinks there's a temporal disturbance."

"Sounds serious." Chaozu spoke with the tone of someone who understood exactly how serious it was.

"Yea." Gohan didn't want to dwell on the subject. Temporal disturbances were not well documented phenomena. Scientists weren't sure what caused temporal disturbances. Nobody knew how to fix one either.

Shouting drifted into the living room. The voices were far away at first and the words weren't clear enough to make out but as the voices got closer, the words became understandable.

" - LET IT GET AWAY?" Bulma shouted as she stormed into the living room and began to rummage through a desk.

"I didn't fall asleep on purpose!" Dr. Briefs argued, following his daughter indoors. "The android must have had some sort of sedative concealed in - "

Gohan went rigid. "The android ESCAPED?"

"Ta-DUH." Bulma began throwing the contents of the desk over her shoulder as she continued her search. "Father decided to take a nap."

Dr. Briefs was indignant. "Look, how many times do I have to tell you? I _didn't_..."

The front door of Capsule Corp creaked on its hinges as it was flung open. For a moment everyone in the room froze. Then Gohans ability to detect ki told him what was going on. "Chaozu!" He ran outside.

Chaozu had put about twenty yards between himself and the Capsule Corp mansion. Gohan covered the distance so quickly that he almost seemed to vanish and reappear.

"The android's not here. I don't sense it." Chaozu beamed. He was now on the outside edge of the variable magic field and obviously felt better for it.

In fact he felt much better. Chaozu knew exactly where both the androids were - he'd learned ages ago that sometimes it was easier to lie to mortals than explain things to them - and more importantly, he'd become aware of where someone else was. _Ten-san!_

And then, quite abruptly, something else registered in Chaozus mind as well. Something that left him wearing the glazed expression of a deer caught in the headlight of an oncoming train. An energy signature that he hadn't sensed for nineteen years.

_... oh no way..._ Usually Chaozu would have been glad to sense this particular energy signature but then, usually this particular energy signature wouldn't have been hostile. _... Feng?_

* * *

Android 17 was, technically, still in the gravity room. He was also, technically, lying in the middle of a hallway in Lunar University which meant that if anyone looked in the gravity room, they wouldn't be able to see him anymore.

At 20g most of his robotic joints had either locked up or melted. The gravity was turned off now but the damage had been done. He was paralyzed. Android 17 lay on the floor with his eyes squeezed shut because the last thing he'd seen was a man in a labcoat with a toolbox. _Oh please not scientists._ he thought, _Anything but scientists. I'm too young to be diassembled!_

Something lightweight was placed on his chest.

"mrew?"

Android 17 cautiously opened his eyes and found himself looking up at a very small black cat. A short woman wearing black robes and a pointy black hat was standing to his left. The word 'witch' might have come to mind if it had been in Android 17s vocabulary.

The woman spoke. "One wrong move out of you, buster and there won't be enough left to recycle. Understood?"

* * *

" - and please keep your hands where we can see them." An office demon said authoritively.

There were nearly twenty office demons that had the elevator surrounded and each one carried a large weapon which appeared to be a vicious hybrid of a tape depenser and a bazooka. All of the weapons were currently aimed at Kami in a distinctly threatening manner.

"Excuse me," Kami couldn't help but sound bewildered, "am I to understand that I'm being arrested?"

"That is correct. We are also arresting your accomplices."

The office demons held their ground, not moving closer. They had heard enough stories about Saiyan fighting abilities that the sight of Bardock was causing them to expect resistance.

Bardocks expression indicated that the thought of resistance had indeed crossed his mind. But he wasn't sure what exactly the weapons of the office demons did and he didn't want to find out either. Anything that could be pointed at a god had to be dangerous.

"I suppose there's a first time for everything." Kami scanned the area. He stood around two feet taller than most the office demons so it wasn't hard to look past them. "May I know why I'm being arrested?"

The lead office demon frowned. "Lord Enma has not yet finished compiling the list of charges against you."

"Lord Enma, is it?" Kami shook his head, both his antenna bobbing with the motion. "Hmph. Figures. Well you can tell Lord Enma that we'll have to sort this out later. I'm busy at the moment."

"You have no authority to..." Began the spokesdemon.

"I am the god of Earth." Kami reminded everyone. "Therefore attempting to save the Earth is quite within my realm. Now, if you'll excuse me..." He stepped past the nearest office demon and stood on his tiptoes. "DAIMIO?"

The office demons gathered into a huddle and held a whispered conference.

"So do we arrest him then or...?"

"Earth IS his realm..."

"But does that justify...?"

"It's the glass elevator, isn't it?" Kami asked the surrounding darkness. "Look, I'm sorry about that but there isn't any other transport in hell. You'll just have to confront your fear of - "

"Ahem? And WHO said I was afraid of anything?" growled a voice directly beside him.

Inwardly, Kami grinned. He'd known that would work. He and Daimio had once been the same Namek, after all, so they knew each others minds fairly well. Kami shrugged without turning. "It's perfectly understandable. I mean if I'd spent a hundred years..."

"Two hundred and ninety two years." Daimio corrected in a tone of voice that made the temperature around him drop fifty degrees.

"Two hundred and ninety two years then." Kami continued unphased, "Well if _I'd_ spent that sort of time trapped in a denshi jar then I'd probably have a fear of glass containers as well."

Kami turned and stared levelly at the Namek that was, at least in appearance, his identical twin. The main outward differences between them were the colors they wore and the symbols on their robes. Kami wore white robes, Daimio wore black robes and each had their formal title stitched across the front. The only other noticable differences between them were that Daimio was slightly more muscular and much less cheerful.

Daimio stood with his arms folded across his chest and scowled through narrow eyes - first at Kami then at Bardock. "Had to bring the kid along, didn't you?"

"Rules of the realm." Kami nodded before Bardock could protest being referred to as a kid.

Despite having around three hundred years of martial arts training, Kami couldn't win a fight. He wasn't a bad warrior, he just wasn't allowed to win. It was part of his contract. The people of Earth had decided a long time ago that they didn't want a god who believed in capital punishment watching over their planet. Smiting was outdated.

A tense silence settled between the two Nameks while in the background, the office demons were having a heated debate over which release forms Kami should have filled out in order to get permission to visit hell and try to save Earth.

"Look," Daimio growled without taking his gaze off an increasingly confused Bardock, "just because that brat defeated me fourteen years ago doesn't mean..."

At this point Bardock realized that Daimio, whom he had never met before, had mistaken him for someone else. Bardock winced. The apparent resemblance that he had to a son that he barely knew of was beginning to concern him - even moreso because Kami seemed to be counting on it. Bardock was fairly certain that the complete lack of introductions meant that for now, he was just supposed to pretend to be Kakarott.

"Do you like Lord Enma?" Kami asked.

Daimio was caught off guard by this interruption but answered quickly, sounding irritated. "Why would I like the guy who sentenced me to spend eternity in hell?"

"Good. We have one thing in common then." Kami went back into the elevator, handed Bardock his wooden staff and lifted the still-sleeping Vegeta off the floor so that he wouldn't get stepped on. "Now do you want to get out of here or not?"

Daimio actually hesitated to consider that. Half of his brain was screaming that this had to be a trap and the other half of his brain was screaming that Kami was supposed to be pure good so therefore, this couldn't possibly be a trap.

"We could blindfold you for the elevator ride." Kami offered.

"Pft. Yea. Right. That would imply that I trusted you." Daimio snorted. "And I don't."

"The feeling is mutual." Kami smiled sweetly. "That makes two things we have in common."

Daimio glared for a moment longer then stalked into the elevator, muttering towards Kami. "I'm not gonna fuse. I know that must be what you came to get me for but I'm not gonna fuse. Understand? You even TRY to fuse and I'll turn your precious mortals into confetti."

"Of course we're not going to fuse." Kami said. And he actually managed to say the words without making the statement sound as if it ought to have an asterick that would imply the existence of a lot of small print defining the specific circumstances where exceptions applied.

The door slid shut behind Daimio. With a jolt, the elevator began its trip upwards through the void.

From the darkness below, the office demons watched the elevator leave. The lead office demon smiled. "Call the furnace center." He ordered calmly. "Tell them to switch the elevators off."

* * *

And on the outskirts of South Capital City, the ragged survivors of yesterdays disaster were touched by an unnatural breeze. They had been clustered around a fresh campfire, sharing everything - the warmth, the space, the meal that they had scavenged from the ruins. They had even begun to talk to each other - to share their stories, their knowledge, their fears, their hopes and dreams.

The past twenty-four hours had turned a handful of complete strangers into best friends.

But as soon as the breeze touched them there was suddenly silence again. The sharing stopped and for a while, the refugees stood apart instead of clustered together. Clutching their makeshift weapons with renewed fervor. Staring across the darkness at each other with increasing amounts of wild distrust and resentment.

The breeze grew stonger. The silence was torn to pieces by screams.

* * *

"Ugh..." Chaozu hugged himself and waited for the world to come back into focus. He'd fainted again.

Back when he'd been much younger, Chaozu had fainted almost everytime anything had died. As a result he had spent very little of his early childhood conscious. Needless to say, he'd become tired of that routine. So within a mere century Chaozu had mustered enough apathy to counter his own inherit sensitivity. He'd still feel certain deaths, that was just unavoidable, but they no longer made him faint.

Large scale mass murder - for example, the leveling of an entire city - did still bother him though. That's why Chaozu had fainted earlier. Yesterday had caught up to him.

Gohan held Chaozu at eye-level. The demi-saiyan youth had caught him. "If detecting the androids is gonna make you faint..."

Considering the kind of day that Gohan had already had, it wouldn't have been too hard for Chaozu to explain that he'd actually fainted because a band of refugees on the outskirts of South Capital City were in the process of killing each other. And that, to make matters worse, the refugees were becoming violent Earthbound ghosts because a certain white cat - Death incarnate - was refusing to go near the area.

However Chaozu had successfully avoided mentioning that he was an immortal for a decent portion of his very long life. He had good reasons for wanting to be forgotten, not the least of which was that if people actually started worshipping him then he might end up trapped in a temple again. So Chaozu wasn't about to admit his divinity to...

... to someone who might just be the biggest threat to him personally. Chaozu blinked at Gohan, who was now suggesting that maybe they should go back inside without being aware that he was precisely the kind of weapon specific gods were afraid of. Because Gohan could level a city if he wanted to. And if Feng showed up, he'd want to.

_Oh cripes._ thought Chaozu. There had to be a way to keep Feng away from the kid.


	9. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 9**

There was time, the pulse of The Universe which was so constant that a person could - and yes, in fact, most people did - set their watch by it and then there was Time, the personification of. Thus the process and the person - the realm and the god - were just two different parts of the same thing.

Around planet Earth, Time was best known as Father Time but occasionally he was called a name like Adam or Tempus. Time didn't understand why he was called these things since time was something that applied to all genders or lack thereof. His sibling - and the Earthlings called her by a lot of different names: Space, Sky, Mother Nature, Life, Evolution, Destiny, Fate, Eve, Mary - had always tried to assure him that it was just a phase that humanoids went through because of their limited perception ranges.

In the beginning there had been One. One had created and become The Universe and also, One had created the Two. Time and Space were those Two.

Time had not always had a humanoid shape but lately humanoid shapes had been the trend and needless to say, Time had to keep up with the times. However taking on a certain shape usually meant thinking like the shape. So taking on a humanoid shape had the side effect of often causing humanoid behavior.

Anger is an incredibly humanoid behavior. Time wasn't merely out of tune, he was very upset. His heart rate was up and thus the pulse of The Universe was no longer a constant.

Nobody likes being run over.

* * *

Reflected in the helmets of three spacesuits was a scene that only Master Roshi had been halfway prepared to behold. As a younger man studying to be a wizard, Roshi had always had a mild fascination for the concept of time and the magics that could be applied to it. Of course Roshi had turned out to be infinitely more skilled at martial arts than at magic so he'd dropped out of one school and joined up with another. Not before he'd read most of the lore about time though.

Time, Master Roshi knew, was not something to mess around with. Sure. Time could be killed and wasted and zoned and limited and lost and found. People could even 'buy time' or 'make time' or 'spare time'. And yea, there were even a few things in existence that were timeless. Yet despite all that mortals and immortals alike had ever done to Time - time was, usually, still a constant. Which meant that almost everything anyone did to Time had very little affect on time itself. Time was just that... Strong wasn't even the word.

Saying that Time was strong would have been like saying that polar ice caps were cold. It was true but also an understatement of the highest degree.

Which was hard to believe when you were actually looking at the personification of Time. Because Time currently looked like an upset insurance salesman. He wore a dark business suit complete with starched shirt, decorative cuff links, neatly combed hair, polished shoes and an ugly tie.

A fresh set of tracks went up the front of the suit. Oolong, Puar and Master Roshi didn't have to wonder what had caused the tracks. Suspended in the darkness all around them were nuts and bolts and gears...

With a barbaric yell - a sound that could only be compared to a hundred angry alarm clocks blaring away off-key - Time brought the sword down again. It was a very large sword, very sharp and it was doing a wonderful job of hacking the time machine to bits.

Master Roshi didn't have to see the shapeshifters facial expressions to have a fair idea of what they were thinking because he was thinking it too. The time machine - that's what it had to be - was a modified one person submarine. An empty modified one person submarine. Master Roshi felt the knots of anxiety crawl through the pit of his stomach and begin to work their way up his spine. _What happened to that one person?_

* * *

"No hon, give those back. Those aren't toys." Mrs. Briefs gently tugged a shiny set of aircar keys away from her grandson. The one year old responded by sniffling, puffing out his chest and staring at her balefully. It was the sort of look that often preceded a temper tantrum.

Mrs. Briefs couldn't keep herself from smiling. _Exactly like his mother._

She sighed and her smile faded, the thought had a somber side. While Mrs. Briefs cared a great deal for her daughter, anymore it felt like caring was a one way street. Her affection towards Bulma was rarely acknowledged - much less returned.

Bulma hadn't been raised right. Her parents had been multimillionaires by the time they'd gotten married. They been a liberal young couple and Bulma had been their first and only child. The Briefs hadn't really known anything about parenting back then. They hadn't realized that they'd been spoiling Bulma at the time, they'd just wanted the best for their precious daughter. Bulma had been born with genius potential and so her parents had done everything possible to encourage her development.

The overall end result was that Bulma had grown up viewing her parents - and most other people - as her own personal servants. Though Bulma had mellowed out a bit due to age and adventures, her skewed perception of others remained a large part of her personality. Especially around her parents, Bulma still acted like someone who believed she could get away with anything.

Mrs. Briefs wasn't going to make the same mistakes with Trunks. She pointed at his pouty expression and tried to sound stern. "Sorry hon. You can't always have everything you want."

She frowned at her own words. _What an awful thing to tell a child whose father is dead._ Mrs. Briefs had never been sure what to make of her unofficial son-in-law but it struck her as being very sad that Trunks would grow up feeling as if he hadn't met his own father.

And at this exact moment the very first inklings of an insanely complicated design took shape in Mrs. Briefs brain. She scribbled the vague notion down on a notepad without understanding what she'd just thought. She rarely understood her mechanical ideas, she just had them. Mrs. Briefs had designed most of Capsule Corporations products this way so the sensation wasn't strange to her anymore. When ideas came to her, she sketched them out or wrote them down. Then her husband would look at the design and, when it was practical, build it.

When she was done, Mrs. Briefs put the pencil down and left the notepad on the kitchen counter. She lifted Trunks out of his highchair, slung a babybag over her shoulder and went through a mental checklist. Once she was certain that she had everything, Mrs. Briefs stepped into the hallway and paused by the doorframe of the livingroom.

"Bulma! Be reasonable!" Dr. Briefs was saying, "We have to be cautious. Long-range deactivation would be - "

"I don't CARE what's safest." Bulma growled. She was by now, beginning to put some sort of remote together but for once her motions were rigid and full of uncertainty. How did you build a device to deactivate something that you'd never seen? "I've got to see these androids for myself." Bulma snapped. She was clearly in need of closure. She couldn't bring herself to believe that so many of her peers had died without her even noticing. Maybe seeing the androids would help things make sense somehow. "If we turn them off at long-range, we'll never find them."

It had, more than once, crossed Bulmas mind that the situation didn't have to be permanent. She could just find or build a spaceship, pack everyone onto it, leave for Planet Namek, borrow those dragonballs and... No. That would be silly. Bulma couldn't just go skipping off into space without any evidence of the disaster. She hadn't seen her friends die and while she didn't truly want to see the corpses, she felt like maybe she needed to. It would help her to get her emotional bearings. It was the only way things would start to sink in.

At the moment Bulma couldn't convince herself that the problem existed. So she didn't invest much energy into the concept of getting a wish granted in order to make things okay.

Besides the last time that Bulma had gone to Planet Namek, the trip had taken a month. If there really truly were a couple of superpowered evil androids running around killing things - then was leaving the Earth behind a good idea? Could the supposively endangered planet survive for a month without them?

"We don't even know what frequencies - "

"Then we'll just have to try all of them." Bulma said curtly.

Dr. Briefs was persistant. "They've got to be shielded though! Otherwise they'd pick up radio and television signals and..."

Mrs. Briefs inserted a comment into the debate. "I've got Trunks. We're going to take Gohan home."

Bulma, as usual, hardly seemed to hear her mother. Dr. Briefs nodded approval in a distracted manner. Without further ado, Mrs. Briefs stepped outside. Completely unaware that the notes she'd left on the kitchen counter contained the beginnings of a time machine.

* * *

When most humanoids hear the word 'furnance', they get the mental image of a big metal box which is responsible for heating their home in the winter. Some humanoids will even know where in their home the furnance is located.

Hell also had a furnance. It was not a big metal box but it did keep all the levels of hell that were meant to be uncomfortably warm at their assigned temperatures. Because there were more levels of hell than anyone had gotten around to counting and because the furnance had to be working year round, Hells Furnance could have only been designed by immortal engineers.

Take note. Engineers. Plural. One immortal engineer was usually enough to create all seven wonders on a world but Hells Furnance had warranted the attention of several immortal engineers. To date, the furnance was the second most complex and amazing project that had ever been built.

The most complex and amazing project that had ever been built was called The Universe and that project wasn't even finished yet.

If a mortal were to look upon Hells Furnance, they would instantly go blind. Not that there was any danger of that ever happening. The furnance generated immense amounts of heat. If any mortals got within two lightyears of the thing, they would melt. This was why Hells Furnance was not a big metal box - no known metal could function at such temperatures and attempts to use unknown metals had not yet met with success. The main problem with the rare unknown metals was keeping them unknown. It was hard to work with the materials without learning about them in the process.

Hells Furnance was cosmic powered. The 'furnance' itself consisted of a few gigantic suns that were held together by their own gravity. Thus the 'furnance room' was vast beyond most mortals ability to comprehend. A billion planet Earths could have fit in the 'room' without even being crowded.

It wasn't so much the mind-boggling amounts of energy that Freezia, King Kold, their allies and the entire Saiyan Army were putting out that was the problem. The problem was centered around the sheer speed at which the battle in hell was generating such massive doses of energy. Hells Furnance could have absorbed all the excess energy - if only it had been able to absorb the energy a little more quickly.

Legions of office demons scampered around indecisively, arguing loudly with each other. There wasn't a procedure for this. This wasn't supposed to happen. Hells Furnance wasn't supposed to even be capable of overloading. Not ever. But it was overloading anyway and the office demons didn't have the faintest idea what to do about it. And to make things worse, they had just gotten a call telling them to turn off all the elevators.

Hells Furnance powered the elevators. So would turning the elevators off help anything? Would the furnance be able to absorb more energy faster if it had less programs running? Or would turning more things on be a better idea, would that help use up all the extra energy?

"Anyone who turns those elevators off is a complete and utter moron and I will personally design their tombstone."

The effect of those few words was electric. The panicked office demons stopped everything they were doing. What they had just heard was the ultimate immortal engineer threat. Because if an immortal engineer designed your tombstone then, for better or worse, your reputation would never die.

Mister Popo stepped out of a patch of light, shading his eyes with a hand. He would have preferred to have stepped out of the shadows since that would have seemed more dramatic but in a place with multiple suns, there weren't any shadows. Nevertheless, he'd managed to make an impression. The office demons were standing around gaping at him as if he was... well... an immortal engineer.

It should be pointed out that if a complete pantheon featuring every god from every religion on every world was ever written down, immortal engineers would be in the first book. Office demons might make it into the twenty-fifth book. There was a noticable differential in rank since helpers of certain gods were ranked right below the gods they helped. Office demons worked for - and thus were ranked right under - Lord Enma.

Mister Popo was very aware of this. This was exactly why he didn't ever want to attract negative attention from higher ranking gods. Or rather, god. Immortal engineers worked directly for The Universe. Mister Popo had never cared about pulling rank. Politics weren't his style and it wasn't as if he had magical powers galore or anything. Being a god, even a high-ranking god, didn't automatically make you strong. Immortal and invincible were two separate things - if they hadn't been two separate things then there wouldn't have been two different words for them.

In his own view Mister Popo was just a simple immortal engineer - not even a god technically, just employed by one. And he built things. Artifacts, wonders, dimensional portals, an occasional planet. Mister Popo'd been building things for so long that he couldn't even explain the process anymore. It was instinctive. Creating bizarre new artifacts came as naturally to Mister Popo as breathing did to human beings. Typically anything that took him away from designing and building things was lucky to hold his attention for ten consecutive seconds.

Hells Furnance was going to be an interesting little job though. Just as soon as he got rid of the office demons.

While he didn't hate anyone, Mister Popo had never had much respect for the office demons. They were such paperwork fanatics - it was like they couldn't even think for themselves without filling out a request form first. No imagination whatsoever. Oh well, at least they'd be easy to get rid of.

"Blueprints." Mister Popo said firmly. "I'm going to need the blueprints. All of them. In triplicate. And the warranties. And the receipts. Bring me every single operation manual that has ever been written. And get every map in existence, even the outdated and predated ones." He fixed a moody stare on the nearest office demon. "You DO have all of that on file, correct?"

He knew that they did.

* * *

A patch of swirling fog swept through the ruins, moving at a slow pace with a terrible sense of purpose. Tenshinhan suppressed his energy as much as he dared and waited for the mobile fog to pass. He'd managed to make telepathic contact with a living human on the outskirts of the city but now that person was dead. Tenshin wasn't sure how or why the persons death had happened. He'd tried to make contact with the persons ghost to ask.

As a result the other ghosts now knew that he was there and they were looking for him. Tenshinhan had the distinct impression that being found would not be a good thing. Their minds, their energy... They had all become tainted somehow. The other ghosts were so hostile that they weren't even capable of coherant thought anymore.

Suppressing his energy had the effect of making him a less visible ghost. It was the best Tenshin could do for now. There wasn't much left in South Capital City that anyone could hide behind and he was still anchored down. He couldn't leave the place, not even if he wanted to.

It was puzzling. The other ghosts didn't seem to be anchored to anything. Nor did the giant creature surrounded by the orbs of light. Both sets of energy were prowling the area that Tenshin was trapped in, searching in ever-smaller concentric circles. They hadn't found him yet but they were going to eventually. Tenshinhan clenched his fists and waited, feeling cornered. It was becoming very tempting to attack.

_Don't. You. Dare._

There wasn't a flash of light or any blurring - no transition at all really. Tenshinhan was just suddenly somewhere else. The first thing he caught sight of was Capsule Corp. Tenshin had been a well-informed assassin while alive, he knew the story about Capsule Corps monster and so he took a few respectful steps away from the place.

"What did you just do...?" Gohan had noticed the flux in his own energy. The ten year old felt as if he'd gained a very faint second ki but his brain wasn't letting him believe that such a thing was possible. Gohan was trying to rationalize it away by believing that perhaps Chaozu had just given him a power boost of some sort.

"If everything works out, I'll explain later." Chaozu promised, speaking to both his friends at once while gazing southward. "I have to be somewhere else."

Chaozu didn't give anyone a chance to argue. He simply vanished. At least, that's how it looked to anyone alive. Tenshinhan caught a glimpse of his friend ascending to the astral plane and if he hadn't been dead already, the shock might have killed him.

* * *

The creature in South Capital City paused in mid-step. Feng had felt the energy move. The creature turned, its immortal senses allowing it to see where the energy had gone. North... north... northwest. There. There it was. And it was with an even stronger energy signature now. Good. More power for Feng.

The orbs of pinkish light rotated around Feng with every shakey step the creature took. Orbiting the creature, possessing it. It wasn't hard for the prisoners of time to possess Feng because Feng already had unspeakable amounts of hatred towards mortals. Mortals had caused Feng nothing but pain and embarrassment. Feng had always been willing to forgive and forget before. Always willing to give a second chance or a third or even a twenty-seventh. But the mortals had never improved and Fengs once-infinite patience had finally evaporated.

It had happened nineteen years ago. A mortal had killed Feng. That in itself was no big deal since Feng had died before. But this mortal... This mortal had managed to kill Feng in the one way that would make it nearly impossible for Feng to fully reincarnate. And then, to add insult to injury, the stupid worthless mortal'd had the gall to claim that her death had been an _accident_. As if anyone could kill a goddess permenantly by accident.

Feng limped northward and shrieked in frustrated outrage. She was anxious to recover her monsterous physical body and bestow grisly revenge on mortals in general.

The wind howled and all across The Universe, the divorce rate tripled. Love was on the warpath.

* * *

BECAUSE SKELETONS HAVE A LIMITED RANGE OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS. Korin answered. He was standing beside a recently-deceased person that had wanted to know why Death smiled so much.

"Huh. Guess that makes sense." The spirit considered. "But do you ever feel like, you know, not smiling?"

Korin was currently on the other side of the globe but he heard Fengs vengeful shriek. Still smiling, Korin flattened his ears back in distress. THERE HAVE BEEN MOMENTS.

Death had no power over Love. If anyone was going stop Feng before she caused more mortals to destroy themselves, it was going to have to be one of Korins other three siblings. Korin didn't like their odds. Love had gained influence in most other realms so it wasn't going to be easy to bring Feng down.

A frazzled office demon finally materialized to collect the human spirit. "Sorry to make you wait." The demon said curtly, flipping through the stack of paperwork on his clipboard. "We're experiencing some minor technical difficulties with the afterlife. Now then..."

"_Technical difficulties with the afterlife_?" The dead person echoed incredulously. "How exactly do you experience _'technical difficulties'_ with the afterlife? Has hell frozen over or something?"

The office demon stiffened, coughed and cleared his throat before speaking in a tone of forced pleasantry. "Now, now - it's nothing for you to worry about mortal. I'm sure that even as we speak, repairs are - "

"Excuse me but I think it IS something to be worried about!" The human ghost interrupted. "I'm bloody well dead in case you haven't noticed and I don't want to be carted off to spend eternity in any place that's having technical difficulties, thank you very much."

"Don't be silly. Mortals always go to the afterlife." The office demon glanced towards Korin for some support but Korin didn't notice. His attention was directed elsewhere.

The astral plane tremored and the vibrations grew more violent as the source of the disturbance approached. In a sudden rush of air and flame, something thundered past them. The office demon and the human spirit were both blown over by the force of its passing. Korin alone remained standing. He turned to watch the colorful streak fade into the distance.

As always, the cat smiled. HMMMM.


	10. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 10**

Five hundred years ago there had been violent storms on Planet Namek. If the storms had ended a little sooner, a Namekian child would never have been sent into space. If the storms had lasted just a little longer then the child wouldn't have been sent into space alone.

What were the odds?

Instead of getting lost in space, instead of landing on some barren deserted world - the child had managed to land on Earth. And instead of being found by government scientists or any other sort of Earthling that would have wanted to put the Namek either into a zoo or under a microscope, the Namekian child had met Korin. The Namek had been taken in and raised by the gods of Earth. The child had become Kami.

What were the odds?

Thirty years ago, planet Vegeta had been reduced to space dust. If the disaster had happened any sooner then a certain Saiyan infant would have died in the explosion. If the disaster hadn't happened at all then perhaps the infant would have grown up knowing his blood relatives. But instead the infant had also made it to Earth. After all, it wasn't as if an infant could steer a space pod. There were so many things that could have gone wrong. Goku could have ended up anywhere. But he'd made it Earth.

What were the odds?

And not only had Goku made it to Earth intact, he'd been found and adopted - not by a tailor, not by a circus, not by village of lumberjacks - but by a legendary martial artist. And not just ANY legendary martial artist but by one of the few that owned a dragonball. So instead of becoming a third-class mass murderer or a forgotten orphan left alone in the wilderness, Goku had grown up to become a legendary hero that went around saving other peoples planets.

What were the odds?

The threads of coincidence kept spinning, weaving together in a tight double helix - the building block of some larger design. Uranai Baba concentrated. The past was a pattern. The future would continue that pattern. It was a living pattern and so the details were always a little different but the basic pattern was the same.

Uranai Baba had been alive for so long that she'd begun to take the pattern for granted. She'd always looked at the details more than the overall picture but now... If she could just get the mental image of the pattern, perhaps the details would fill themselves in and she'd discover what the future held. She could almost make it out.

Androids. Dead humans that were dug up and programmed - albeit accidentally - by other humans to destroy humankind in general. Androids that not only did what they were programmed to do but that were even stronger than they could have been designed to be. Androids that had spirit, attitude and personality. Robots that had somehow gotten the beginnings of _humanity_ mixed in to their codes. Androids that, in the end, would almost certainly have to destroy themselves to complete their mission of total human extermination.

What were the odds?

A ten year old demi-saiyan. A boy named after a legendary human that he'd never met and actually related to more legends than he'd ever be aware of. The sheer unlikeliness of his birth, the precise combination of bloodlines... It was mind boggling. And while the kid hadn't been the strongest warrior or even the most experienced one, yesterday he had somehow survived what every other mortal defender of Earth had died against.

What were the odds?

Kamis Lookout. After thousands of years of enduring all sorts of disasters, the Lookout was gone. And the holy structure had finally lived up to its name - for as it had fallen from the sky the villagers below had screamed "look out!". The villagers had lived under Kamis residence for countless generations. Yet in its final moments, they hadn't even known that they'd been yelling the name of the place.

What were the odds?

The time machine! Oh everyone had theories about time machines but to actually build a working one! A real live working time machine - it must be a working one, it was causing the ripples in time. It hadn't even been built yet and it was already making a difference in the timeline. How amazing was that? How unlikely was that?

What were the odds?

Enemies and complete strangers becoming friends. Gods that could die. Mortals that could be reincarnated. Talking animals, flying humans and unlikely heros. Villians that were always stronger than ever but that somehow always managed to conceal their power until they wanted to be noticed. Senzu beans and gravity rooms and capsules in general. Invisible sentient schools of magic and dangerous underworld monsters posing as cuddly household pets.

Uranai Baba had been on Earth for eons, watching. Just watching. You could learn a lot just by watching. She'd managed to make a fortune off what she'd learned. People didn't always like the truth but they were willing to pay to hear it anyway and sometimes, they were willing to pay _to not hear it_ too. Uranai Baba had never really valued money and had honestly never expected to become a multi-trillionaire. But that was just how the world worked. Nobody buying a single lottery ticket really expected to win. The odds were against winning. And yet, eventually, someone always won.

It had become Uranai Babas personal opinion that in any given situation, the most impossible things were the ones that were bound to happen.

So that was it then. That was the pattern. The impossible was always pending. Uranai Baba adopted a thoughtful pose, resting a wrinkled hand on her double chin and tapping an unseen foot. _What is the single most unlikely event to occur? The one thing that nobody believes can happen..._

Somewhere in the depths of Uranai Babas brain, a metaphysical penny was thrown off a nonexistant skyscraper. And it hung there, spinning in midair. Not falling, not getting twisted up in the dimensions - just hanging there. It was a mental signal. Predicting the future had always been a bit like waiting to see where and when the coin fell and how it landed. Thus if the coin didn't fall, there wasn't a future to predict.

_Ah. Of course._ Uranai Baba snapped her fingers. _The Apocalypse._

She proceeded calmly down the hallway. Leaving behind the still-paralyzed Android 17 who was desperately trying to convince a very small black cat that androids were not chew toys.

She passed a fire extinguisher that hung from a fireproof brace on the wall and that was labeled, in neatly stenciled text, _'in case of fire'_. She kept walking. A bit further down the darkened corridor were several more fire extinguishers. These were slightly larger and labeled _'in case of fire elemental'_.

There were several other implements hanging along the walls. _'In case of barbarian invasion'. 'In case of plague of goldfish'. 'In case of bottomless pit'. 'In case of math test'._ Because Lunar University HAD been a well-reputed magical facility. Staff and students alike - or at least, any who had valued their survival - had made it their duty to be prepared for everything from localized natural disasters to upset gods and unexplained multidimensional phenomena.

Finally - at the end of the corridor, in the back of a cluttered storage room, behind a bookcase and buried under a couple thousand years worth of dust - Uranai Baba located a small hole in the wall where the nail had been. She searched the floor for a bit, sneezing frequently and eventually located a tiny leather pouch. In faded handwriting that no one under the age of four hundred would have been able to read, the pouch was labeled _'in case of The Apocalypse'_.

* * *

The Capsule Corp equivalent of a bright red Ferrai materialized. It was slick little aircar with a glossy paint job. The slanted body of the vehicle was streamlined, the chairs were heavily padded and the large engine appeared to be the source of more than half the aircars total weight. It was the kind of vehicle that seemed to beg for a speeding ticket even when it was parked. The type of aircar that wasn't even advertised to the general public because the pricetag was nine digits long. The sort of vehicle that could make ghosts contemplate wearing seatbelts and possibly helmets.

"Q-Leap?" Gohan nervously read the aircars personalized license plates.

"Quantum, hon." Mrs. Briefs informed him cheerfully from where she was fastening Trunks into his carseat. "The Q is for quantum."

Infant Trunks wore an expression that suggested he would be right at home with a large flashing sign that had 'HELP!' written on it in bold print.

Gohan peered at the speedometer of the vehicle and saw exactly what he'd been hoping not to see. The aircars maximum speed was three digits, very nearly four. "Er... Maybe I'll just fly." He tried to sound polite about it. "I'm sure I'd get there eventually. Wouldn't want to be any trouble."

Flying at speeds that required three digits to express was something that Gohan was comfortable with - as long as he was in control of his own flight. He'd have to push the boundries on Super Saiyan to reach those kinds of speeds but that seemed less risky than essentially handing the steering over to someone else. Gohan had just never liked being in vehicles.

_Could be because you're not old enough to drive._ Something thought.

Gohan heard this thought and that bothered him because he was fairly sure that it hadn't been one of his own thoughts. Yet currently, as far as Gohan knew, nobody else was present that could have been aware of what he was thinking. Gohan glanced around, visibly agitated. He didn't see anyone next to him. Nevertheless, he had the distinct feeling that something was there and that it was shaking its head.

The distraction cost him valuable opportunities to escape.

"Nonsense, hon. It's no trouble." Mrs. Briefs said sweetly with the tone that mothers everywhere use to make their kids do chores. "You've flown across the continent just to end up here. It's the least we can do to make sure you get home safe before the world ends."

"Err..." Gohan tried to think of an argument as he was ushered towards the aircar but Mrs. Briefs had a way with words that tended to leave people speechless.

There weren't any back seats. There was a passenger seat, a drivers seat and Trunks carseat was anchored down inbetween. Trunks now seemed resigned to his fate and shot the world in general a dirty look. Being only a year old he couldn't have known that between the unique driving skills of his grandmother and his mother, he was being prepared for the experience of piloting a time machine.

The human part of Gohans brain was telling him that he was going to die because seatbelts weren't worth much at three digit speeds while the Saiyan part of his brain was reminding him that it wasn't too late to blow up the car. And the most recent voice in his head was thinking: _Uhm... Excuse me? The world is ending since when?_

But Mrs. Briefs was buckled in on the drivers side now and the aircar engine came to life, growling like some sort of dangerous wild animal about to pounce and unleash its full power. "It'll be nice to see your mother again. Haven't visited her in a while." Mrs. Briefs remarked casually, turning on the headlights and stepping down on the gas pedal.

It was forty-two seconds later when her words first made an audible sound and by then the aircar was somewhere between West Capital City and Satan City, busily redefining the phrase _'off road adventure'_.

* * *

Before there were humans, there were animals. Before there were modern animals, there were prehistoric animals. Before prehistoric animals - and just slightly after microscopic single-celled creatures - there had been mythical animals.

Mythical animals were generally ignored in the evolutionary chain of events but all prehistoric and modern animals, including most humanoids, were descended from them. Mythical animals were not what happened when lost tourists saw a new creature and decided to give it an interesting history. Mythical animals were not just something that people living at high altitudes had dreamed up. Granted there WERE a handful of mythical animals that had been the result of intoxicated or otherwise confused humanoid imaginations - but the vast majority of mythical animals had existed long before anything humanoid had.

It is important to understand the logic of mythical animals as ancestors. Evolution is not, as many people believe, a one way street where every step represents an improvement. Evolution goes both ways. Basically what happened was that hey, all the animals could talk. Most of them could fly or cast magical spells. Everything had an amazing talent. Everyone was important and shiny and new. There had actually been a highly sophisticated universal culture...that had been more boring than watching the stars fade.

Every day had been a celebration and eventually the party-goers had gotten sick of it. They had wanted to try something new. They had needed to have bad experiences to balance out the good ones. Thus a large portion of the mythical animals had gradually, with each successive generation, become less flashy and more functional by their own choice. They had given up the magic, the speech, the wings, the immortality. They had wanted to build character. They had wanted to earn and develop talents as needed instead of just having the whole works handed to them. They had wanted to become more substantial.

The mythical animals had been searching for something that, billions of years later, humanoids still didn't fully understand - although most modern animals did. Self-worth.

Gods had not always been humanoid because humanoids had not always existed. Gods had been animals and prehistoric animals and even mythical animals. Gods had only started to become more humanoid because humanoids were very strange creatures that seemed worth investigating. Why didn't the humanoids ever truly feel that their accomplishments were good enough? What was it about self-worth that seemed to conflict with humanoid survival instincts? Shouldn't someone just go down there and try to explain it all to them? Viola. Just like that, humanoid gods.

There were, in truth, countless categories and ranks of gods but only two main types that really mattered: gods that sentient beings believed in and gods that actually existed. A god was typically one or the other - very rarely both.

The believed-in category was, obviously, the easiest to find information on. Believed-in gods had intact temples. They appeared as characters in sacred stories and legends and artwork. The believed-in immortals looked very humanoid most the time and they did or said all sorts of contradictory things. Despite which, mortals worshipped them.

Most of the gods that actually existed didn't want that kind of attention because it didn't make much sense. Besides, it got in the way of their realms. Korin, for example, had never allowed any temple built to him to remain standing. Because Death was not something that could be limited to happening only in temples and fairytales and so forth. Temples were useless to Korin. Generally speaking, Death could not be caused or prevented by prayer.

Feng had always been much the same way - it simply hadn't been very realistic of mortals to try to put Love into a temple. In fact the effort had been almost as ridiculous as the mortals several failed attempts to make Love appear humanoid. Like Death, Love was not something that could be limited to any one species.

Indeed when it came to temples and other such attempts by mortals to control divine powers, most actual gods had found ways of escaping. But for a very long time, one of the younger ones hadn't.

* * *

Chaozu paced the astral plane. It wasn't even his temple, that was the truly annoying thing. He'd gotten trapped in the back of a temple that wasn't even his. His presence there had been pure accident, of course. He'd suffered from one of his more severe fainting episodes and when he'd regained consciousness, the temple had been there as if built around him and people had been making offerings to gods that he'd never even heard of before.

If the temple had been dedicated to him then he wouldn't have hesitated to forcefully relocate the intrusive structure. But it wasn't his and he couldn't just run around kicking over other gods temples. That was bad karma, especially with his realm.

His true physical body was still trapped at the temple. He'd had to leave it behind in order to escape. Mortals would pass it by and say things like "what an odd statue" - if they even noticed it at all.

Chaozu was reluctant to go near the place. He wasn't sure how he could get himself completely out of the temple without violating the terms of his own realm. Also, rather a lot of his brainpower was devoted to the vague hope that maybe reclaiming his physical form wouldn't be necessary. He honestly didn't want to fight anyone, much less another god. This had to be the sort of thing that someone else would take care of.

To most mortals it would have seemed ironic that the one god with all the weapons and all the armies was also the one that didn't enjoy fighting. But Chaozu would have been the first to point out that it was sheer coincidence that he had any influence on warriors. Sure he'd mastered a few martial arts but with his sort of lifespan, who wouldn't? Besides, he liked martial arts. The first thing taught in any decent martial arts class was how to _avoid_ fighting.

War was not his realm. If War was anyones realm, it was Fengs because Love and War went together well - mortals didn't often kill each other over things that they didn't care about. Peace was also not his realm. Chaozu supported the concept of Peace but Peace was just a sub-realm of Korins since deceased mortals had a noticable tendacy to become peaceful.

Chaozu paced. It was an awkward pace because pacing was an activity better suited to humanoid forms and on the astral plane, the term 'humanoid' no longer applied to him.

He did actually owe Feng some vengeance. His empire twenty-two years ago - and most the ones before that - had been wiped out by Feng a little more than anything else. Directly or indirectly, Feng had almost always managed to create problems for Chaozus own realm. Even her absence had been a headache. Love was one of those mysterious catch-22 situations. Couldn't live with it, couldn't live without it and nobody fully understood it.

Chaozu hesitated to glare at the temple that he was pacing around. He was a minor god only in the sense that his realm was extremely subtle. It was something that most mortals overlooked. People didn't notice him in much the same way that they didn't notice exactly how many grains of sand it took to make a beach and that was fine. His realm was one of the few that did in fact have more power if mortals ignored it or took it for granted.

He really really didn't want to fight. He didn't care to risk the attention. But he had to do _something_.

On the one hand, Feng was hunting his friends. So he couldn't afford to wait around for someone else to save the day. On the other hand, it was night. No one could save the day when there wasn't one. That was the first thing to fix then. Chaozu turned away from the temple.

* * *

There were no two ways about it, Freezia was freezing. Hell had gone from boiling lavabeds to glittering permafrost. The battle had stopped and that seemed unfair because Freezia still had a lot of anger to vent. But most of the Saiyans were now icicles - or at least covered in them.

The Icejins were coping a little better with the sudden temperature change. Their native world, planet Ice, had been very accurately named. The cold had been so severe that it had motivated the Icejins to go from large primitive lizards who got their tongues stuck on glaciers to semi-humanoid lizards capable of interstellar travel in less than ten generations.

Historically, it may be of some interest to point out that the Icejins had never left their homeworld intending to become evil tyrants. They'd left their world simply because it was too cold. The whole evilness bit had been a result of the Icejins seeing so many other planets that had it easy - worlds where the natives had an abundance of luxuries like sunlight and water in liquid form. The Icejins had been rabid with envy and as a group, they had decided that they should be allowed to take anything they wanted in order to compensate for their own planets lack of practically everything. Thus had begun an intergalactic empire.

Even now with Freezia and his father, King Kold, both dead the vast Icejin empire remained intact and growing strong. It was being run by Freeias brother, Coola and also by his mother, Queen Galacia.

Freezia thought about his living relatives. He thought that where ever they were right now, they had large fireplaces in their private chambers. If only he was still alive then he'd have a fireplace too. During the past four years of being dead, he'd come to miss his room more than anything else he'd had while alive. There had been a giant fireplace in his room. Nice and warm and cozy. As an added bonus Freezia had often kept the blaze going by adding the corpses of creatures that he'd never liked. Occasionally he'd even tossed in a live idiot or two just to keep things entertaining.

He smiled at the memory. It was the kind of smile that usually made creatures want to grovel for mercy or run away very quickly. _Those were the days._

It wasn't fair that those days were over. He'd had so much left to do - places to conquer and people to kill. How dare anyone take that away from him. How dare anyone tell him that he had been wrong! Planet Ice being so neglected was what had been wrong, the rest of the universe having life so good was what had been wrong.

Saiyans - ha. Speedbumps, nothing more. Super Saiyans - even they were relatively tolerable and insignificant now. What irked Freezia more than anything else was that a bunch of pitiful excuses for demons thought that they could shove him into a frozen hell for eternity. He absolutely _depised_ being cold. It was heriditary, all Icejins did.

Icejins have never truly tapped their anger until they're freezing.

* * *

Uranai Baba peered into the tiny leather pouch labeled _'in case of The Apocalypse'_. The contents appeared to have disentegrated from age. "That can't be good..."

HMMM.

She was standing nose-to-nose with Death.

"AHHH! Korin! Jeez! Give me a heart attack!" Uranai Baba froze for a moment and clutched at her heart region protectively while holding up her other hand. "Figure of speech!" She amended swiftly, "DON'T give me a heart attack! DON'T give me a heart attack!"

SORRY TO HAVE STARTLED YOU. I HAVEN'T FIGURED OUT HOW TO _NOT_ SNEAK UP ON MORTALS.

"You and the rest of divinity." Baba muttered, regaining her composure. "Since you're here though - you wouldn't happen to know what was supposed to be in this pouch, would you?"

Korin twitched his whiskers and grinned. YOU CAN'T SMELL THAT?

The ancient witch took a cautious sniff of the tiny leather pouch. "Leather. Dust. Very old dust. Lots of dust." She leaned back, blinked, grimaced, leaned forward and sniffed the pouch again. There was something else there. She took a moment to place the smell. "... catnip..?" She glanced up. "You mean... This was MEANT to summon you?"

THE UNIVERSE IS ENDING. Korin shrugged. I AM SUPPOSED TO OFFER YOU THE CHANCE TO BEAT THE CROWD.

"Aha." Uranai Baba took a few steps back. "I think I'll pass, thanks anyway. Uhm. Aren't there any alternatives?"

_If anyone knows how to avoid Death,_ she reasoned, _it should be Death._

MY AREA OF EXPERTISE IS NOT LIVING. Korin said flatly. THEREFORE I AM UNABLE TO ADVISE YOU ON HOW TO CONTINUE LIVING.

"Oh wonderful. Very helpful that."

PERHAPS, Korin was positively beaming, YOU SHOULD SPEAK TO HIGHER AUTHORITIES.


	11. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 11**

There were only three actual gods in existence that could be considered superior to Korin and Oolong was insulting one of them.

"I thought Time was supposed to _heal_ all things, not chop them into itty bitty pieces."

Upon hearing this remark Time went rigid. Very slowly, the god turned to face them. Staring out at them through hollow eyes. Still clutching the sword, still covered in tracks and ticking like... well... a timebomb.

Oolong did in fact know what he was risking. He'd attended Voodoo U. He'd studied Cosmic Wrath every Tuesday afternoon. Ironically enough, the class on Spiders and Large Needles had been more frightening. You could avoid Spiders and Large Needles. It was okay to be afraid of things you could avoid, that made sense. Cosmic Wrath was significantly less preventable though and there was no point in worrying much about things you couldn't change.

Puar and Master Roshi both stood as far away from Oolong as was possible to do without falling off the flying carpet. Oolong ignored them. The helmet of his spacesuit reflected the image of an angry god. "Well I hope you're happy with yourself." He snorted. "You've gone and ruined a perfectly good time machine." He almost laughed - he'd always wanted to die laughing. Oolong turned to his cringing peers. "Don't you guys realize what this means? The moron has created a time paradox!"

Time did not appreciate being called a moron. The god advanced, hefting the sword in a way that suggested he could easily destroy them without the blade - but why rush things? Time had all the time in The Universe after all.

_He can kill us._ Some part of Oolongs brain was shivering with the force of the thought. _Over and over and over and over... And it will just keep happening because we're between timelines now, we're in the loop._

Yet what Oolong was sincerely hoping for was to appear back in the submarine as if the last few hours hadn't happened because perhaps they shouldn't have. If the time machine didn't exist then it couldn't cause ripples in time and thus their world shouldn't have suffered from time distortions. And Oolong wouldn't have come to visit Time if there hadn't been time distortions so logically, as soon as things straightened out, he shouldn't be here anymore.

But of course, Time was working against them. And if the time machine had been destroyed without having arrived in the past... Then it hadn't really saved anyone. It hadn't had the chance.

"HEY!" Puar lunged forward and pointed so suddenly that even the god seemed startled. Everyone turned to see what she was pointing at.

Before anyone could stop her, Puar was out of her spacesuit and shifting form. Oolongs jaw dropped and Master Roshi whistled low in admiration.

From the depths of an extremely large blue-tinted hourglass, Time screamed. The god lashed out but the living walls leaned away from him, dodging his blows without releasing him. Puar spoke hurridly. Her voice, like the rest of her, had become glassy but the undertone of grim determination was there. "FIXthetimemachineNOW!"

She had studied shapeshifting at the Academy - of course - but her degree was in Quantum Metaphysics. Proud though she was of her education, Puar had never mentioned the details of her degree to anyone since there hadn't been many situations where her specific educational background made any difference. For once all the diligent hours of study were paying off - if only by allowing Puar to fully understand her situation.

Puar knew that sometimes, you had to fight fire with fire. Or in this case, time paradox with time paradox. If they could just hold Time off and fix the time machine then the time machine would change the past. It only needed to be a one way trip because if the time machine changed the past then the future would be also be affected and in the end maybe the new future wouldn't have a time machine in it at all. The time machine was bound to undo the reasons for its own existence and this was the paradox Puar was hoping to provoke. If everything went right, there wouldn't be any side effects because there wouldn't be any time machine to cause them.

At this point Oolongs brain clicked back into gear. "You stupid cat!" He shouted, "What the hell d'ya think you're doing? You'll get yourself..."

Time finally landed a blow. Puar shattered. For a moment the air was filled with shards of glass that shrank and became something else... body parts... but then in haphazard fast-forward, the explosion reversed. Puar was slammed back together.

"One down." She growled. And then she pounced towards Time again, shifting form.

"... cats have nine lives." Master Roshi sounded ill. "She's going to throw away all of them..."

While Oolong had not always been particularly fond of the blue cat, he'd known Puar longer than anyone else still alive and that counted for something. Quite a lot, actually.

He dropped out of his spacesuit, removed a small flat case from a pocket and slapped it into one of Master Roshis hands. "Hold this." Oolong blurred around the edges, shifting. When it was over, he reclaimed the case. "I think we can stall him." Oolong tried to sound brave as he darted away from Master Roshi. "But you'll have to fix the time machine."

The case was full of needles. Long, thin, sharp sewing needles that glistened as if coated in liquid. Oolong wasn't sure why he'd always carried the case around. He'd privately vowed to never use the talent again because the pain wasn't worth the results. But there had always been so much else going on that he'd never really gotten around to cleaning out his pockets.

Oolong had shifted to become a miniature version of Time. He took a deep breath and shakily selected a needle, preparing to use a skill that he'd sworn to avoid using after surviving college... at good old Voodoo U. _This had better work._

* * *

Earth shuddered. The entire planet waivering as if caught in a violent storm - which in way, it was. For even as the shapeshifters assaulted Time, Feng collided with divine opposition.

Upon Fengs death nineteen years ago, Love had become distant. Caring and charity had, for the most part, ceased. All over The Universe relationships had lost their passion and creatures had become indifferent. Yet despite Loves absence children had still been born. This is because, in the end, sex is not the same as love. Reproduction is an instinctive part of mortal life because reproduction ensures the survival of the species.

Feng slashed the air, leaving a trail of flames over the shoreline. But Survival sat just out of her reach, calm as ever.

Of the five siblings Korin was the eldest, Feng was the third eldest and Chaozu was the youngest. Survival was the second eldest of the batch and the only one that had successfully retained his true mythical form. He hadn't always looked terribly mythical. It was something he'd had to grow into.

If anything mortal had been watching then they would have been confused by the scene. There was some sort of large mostly-invisible monster stomping up and down the shoreline of South Island, bellowing. There was a circle of pinkish light rotating around the mostly-invisible monster. And then, in the ocean just in front of the monster, there was a mediumish island that seemed rather out of place. An island of white sand and palm trees and a pink house with the word 'kame' painted on it.

Feng shrieked and the flames gave the momentary impression of wings. One of the wings was bent but Feng began flapping them anyway, sending a shower of sparks into the water. The ocean sizzled, the Kame House smoldered and the palm trees caught fire.

Survival rolled over, dunking the island into the ocean to put out the fire on his back. Two massive black fins - one in the front, one in the back - rose out of the water as he rolled. He flicked a tidal wave of water at Feng.

Love was drenched. It made her visible. Feng stood nearly twenty stories high and had a wingspan that was easily double her height. She had a long slender neck, a hooked beak, an arced back, two large hoofed feet and glowing pink eyes. Her ghostly body was covered in colorful feathers and dark stripes. Feng was not what mortals thought of when they heard the word 'phoenix' but nevertheless, that's exactly what she was. The Immortal Phoenix. It wasn't Fengs fault that mortals had decided that her true form was too hard to draw. She wasn't going to be simplified to a regular bird-o-flame just because mortals disliked pictures of mythical birds with hoofs.

Nineteen years ago, some idiot mortal living on an island had given her an edible offering. Feng had died of food poisoning while flying over the ocean. Thus her physical body was now underwater - the one place where it could not heal itself.

Survival had been there. He'd been much smaller back then and rather more green than black but he'd been there. The mortal had called him Umigame, a name that meant _sea turtle_. And then, later on without realizing it, mortals had begun calling him something else: Kame Island. And he was still growing. One day, mortals would call him Continental Drift and eventually - if he made it to full adulthood without dying again - Survival would be carrying galaxies on his back. He was a pitch black Unikame, a mythical _universe turtle_.

Fengs firey spirit flared and dried, becoming mostly-invisible once more. She limped up and down the shoreline, flapping and hopping experimentally. Love was not in the air but she wanted to be. It would give her a tactical advantage.

_Sister, this is unlike you. What makes you so hostile?_ Unikame thought slowly, his giant fins sinking beneath the waves as he righted himself. _It is not healthly._

_Tradition without Love is meaningless!_ The words came with difficulty as if thinking clearly required extra effort and Survival recognized that his sister was not speaking completely on her own behalf. Feng was being spoken through. Half the pinkish orbs of light drifted towards him. _You can not win! Surrender!_

Unikame backpaddled and lifted his massive head out of the water, sometimes snapping at the orbs of light. He tried to appeal to his sisters conscience, tried to talk some sense into her and tried to throw enough water at her to make her cool down.

But Feng was completely possessed and these two divine siblings had never been very close. Their realms had often put them at odds. Survival was the patron of endurance, memory and tradition while Feng was the patron of friction. Love, war, fashion trends - Feng had always been passionate about causing changes. She could be downright impulsive too. Unikame simply couldn't adapt fast enough.

* * *

Heaven was an amazingly beautiful place. The perfectly coordinated cloudscapes, the warm soft glow that everything had, the fresh air, the way that almost anything you wanted would materialize on demand. Except people.

Krillen was resting on a cloud. He'd given up on trying to find anyone for now, he needed the break. Heaven wasn't exactly crowded - you always had enough space - but there were just a lot of other spirits there. In a way though, being unable to find specific people might be a good thing. Gave a person more of chance to think. Krillen had no idea what he was going to say to anyone when he did finally find them.

His parents, for example. Although he'd died at age 31 so it was possible that his parents might still be alive. But they would die someday. Sooner or later it had to happen and it would probably be sooner than later if the androids had their way.

From what Krillen remembered of them, his parents hadn't been bad people - they just hadn't been ready to be parents. He didn't really begrudge them much. But he wished that he could understand the reasons for their actions better. What precisely did you say to people who'd abandoned you at age five? Thanks for leaving me at a monestary instead of in a dumpster? And he wondered if his parents had ever been aware of what he'd become. He'd been on television more than enough with all the battles and tournaments but he'd never heard anything.

Maybe they hadn't recognized him. Maybe they had been busy or in some kind of dire trouble. Krillen hoped that wasn't the case. He might not have any idea what to tell his parents but he at least wanted the chance to eventually see them again. It was going to be awkward though, the family had been apart for so long. Twenty-six whole years. So much had changed. Krillen wondered if he'd be able to recognize them.

He was on the verge of drifting to sleep - because the clouds were very comfortable and nobody can stay stressed forever - when something gently shook one of his shoulders and said: "Krillen-san?"

Krillen didn't immediately open his eyes. Very few people on Earth had ever added the respectful '-san' suffix to his name and he sincerely hoped that none of those people were dead. He braced himself for the worst and looked up. And very nearly fell off the cloud in surprise at what he saw.

"DENDE!"

There was a moment of shared happiness and a hug before things became coherant again.

"Wait a minute." Krillen demanded, utterly confused and trying to get accustomed to the sight of a Namek with a wingspan. "Why are you dead? Didn't we save your planet already?"

"Freezia has relatives." Dende sighed for indeed, that's who it was. He ruffled his wings as if they irritated him and untangled his halo from his antenna. "Since Freezia almost died on Namek-sei, our planet became viewed as a threat. The Icejins don't tolerate threats. They made that painfully clear." The young Namek perked up and added, "For what it's worth though, we didn't mention Earth to them."

"... Er. Thanks. Earth has enough of its own problems."

"Apparently." Dende spoke slowly, with heavy accents. It had been four years since he'd used any language aside from Namekian. "You were exploded anyway, huh? A shame. Earth was a nice planet."

"Uhm. As far as I know, Earth is still intact." Krillen said carefully, grimacing. "_I_ was exploded though. How did you guess that?"

It was Dendes turn to look surprised. "No guessing. Didn't anyone tell you? There are - "

* * *

"LEVELS? Of heaven?" Yamucha shook his head and tried to make sense of the concept. "You're kidding, right? Levels?"

"Levels." Nodded a semi-elderly man who had his wings folded behind him.

Most of the spirits that had been in heaven for a while wore robes and this semi-elderly fellow was no exception but his robe had a certain symbol on it. It was the same symbol that Yamucha had on his fighting gi - which was at home in his closet.

Yamucha had been at a baseball practice when he'd suddenly become aware of certain kis or rather, of the absence of certain kis. He'd flown straight from the practice to the conflict and thus had died in his baseball uniform. But if he'd been wearing his orange fighting gi then there would have been small symbol on the front, just over his heart. A symbol that Goku, Krillen and anyone else who'd been trained by Master Roshi wore on their uniform. The kame mark.

The semi-elderly fellow wasn't Goku or Krillen. He wasn't even someone that Yamucha had ever met before. Yamucha had simply seen the kame mark in passing and had decided to start talking to strangers since he hadn't found anyone else yet. After all, this was heaven - the strangers had to be nice.

"So basically what you're telling me is that everyone else HERE, on THIS level..." Yamucha tried to think of dignified way to say what came next but failed. "... was squished?"

"Correct. The level of heaven that you are sent to is determined by cause of death. That way, nobody feels alone. Everyone ends up with a support group full of spirits that can relate." The elderly fellow chuckled dryly. "Welcome to Squished-R-US."

"... Gee, thanks." Yamucha grumbled. He was significantly less than delighted. He no longer had facial scars - that part was wonderful - but he didn't know of many people that had been run over or otherwise crushed. And that meant that everyone he did know who was dead, they must be on different levels of heaven. "Pardon me for asking but whatever happened to the concept of heaven as a place where family and friends are reunited?"

"Ah. That. Yes. A lot of people expect that." The old man sighed. "It would be nice but according to the office demons, not very organized. Because technically I guess all things are related somehow..."

"... so they'd have to allow everyone to be on the same level." Yamucha realized.

"Right. And that's not likely to happen. Office demons have to have things tidy."

A thoughtful silence.

Yamucha had never quite gotten the knack for saving the world - despite his best efforts - but he'd always been fairly good at looking out for himself. And he didn't want to be stuck for eternity on a level of heaven with a bunch of squished strangers. Not without at least making sure that certain dead friends and relatives were as okay as dead people could be.

"There has to be a way to go between the levels."

"Stairways." The old fellow agreed. "The stairways are heavily guarded and staff-access only but they're there."

"Great. That'll work." Yamucha offered out a hand for an introductory handshake. "N' by the way, I'm Yamucha. You are?"

The elderly gent smiled pleasantly and shook Yamuchas hand. "Gohan." He noticed the reaction. "... What?"

"Uhm..." Yamucha dug out the memories. "Legendary martial artist accidentally squished by a large were-monkey. That was you, right?"

"Yes." Gohan - Senior, although he wasn't aware of that yet - looked puzzled. "How did...?"

"I've heard stories." Yamucha said more seriously. "Your adopted grandson was very sorry - but it'll be better for him to tell you all that. Now where are those stairs?"

* * *

It was a delicate spiral staircase built from metal wireframe with the steps spaced out at regular intervals and the clouds visible between them. The extreme top and bottom were both hidden from view by drifting cloud layers.

_Good thing I'm not afraid of heights._ Yajirobe paused to peer over the edge of the handrail. He'd had to pull rank and make some serious threats just to get this far. The office demons might still be after him but the guards hadn't wanted to risk upsetting Deaths Messenger so they'd let him pass.

He resumed climbing, glad that he'd spent the past fourteen years living and training at Korins Tower. The experience had improved his speed, made him accustomed to functioning at high altitudes and had even given him some idea of how to deal with immortals. Skills that were proving to be very handy now that he was dead.

_Shame they weren't more useful BEFORE I was dead._ Yajirobe thought cynically.

He was headed for the level of heaven that he hoped to find Goku on because he wasn't sure where the rest of the warriors had ended up. But Goku had died a year ago. So they all had some idea of which level Goku was on and hopefully everyone would just find a way to get there. The more people Yajirobe could give Korins puzzling message to, the better the odds would be that someone might actually understand it.

* * *

"Uhm... Green One?" Bardock tenatively waved a hand in front of Kamis face. "Hello...?"

Fear was an odd sensation. After everything he'd been through in his life - and afterlife - Bardock was a little surprised to discover that he could still feel pure terror. He was even more surprised at how quickly the fear wore off, replaced by denial.

They weren't in hell anymore. When hell had frozen solid, the elevator had stopped. Daimio had promptly destroyed the elevator and Kami had lead them to this place. This place... Kami had called it _limbo_ but Bardock didn't have words for it. It was too surreal for words. The flashy rainbow sky appeared to be suffering from some sort of drug overdose and there wasn't technically anything that could be called ground. Flying toasters, rubber chickens and other completely silly random objects swirled through the area with alarming frequency.

Daimio also went sailing past. He was bleeding in several places now, his dark robes tattered but he gritted his teeth and powered up enough to stabilize his flight. The demon shouted something in a language that Bardock didn't know and charged forward again.

Lord Enma himself had been waiting for them and he'd brought one of his pets. A blue sphinx. A giant muscular lion with the face and horns of an office demon. It wore a tie and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and its claws were speckled with maroon blood.

"Green One," Bardock hissed, "this is not a good time for a trance."

Actually, the trance was a bit of a blessing. It gave Bardock a perfectly valid reason for not joining the battle. He stood protectively beside Kami and did his best to prevent anything from clobbering the Namekian god. There really wasn't any point in joining the battle. The sphinx was both huge and strong. Daimio was getting batted around as if he were barely more than an insect. And the scent of blood hung thick in the air, as if something else had died there. Recently.

Kami twitched, still clutching Vegetas unconscious form, and spoke softly. "... junior..." He scanned the bright sky and the whirlwind of weird objects. Searching for something. Staring intently as if wanting to see it would be enough to make it appear. "... junior..." Grief gripped his features. Kami staggered across the air wearing a dazed expression and Bardock followed at a cautious distance, carrying the gods wooden staff as if it were a weapon.

Abruptly Kami stopped in his tracks and reached into the air with one hand, snatching at something that Bardock couldn't see until Kami had grabbed it. Then it became visible. Bardock winced and turned away from the sight. Kami had pulled someone from the verge of non-existence. Someone who, from the looks of things, might have been Saiyan once.

Kamis mind wasn't working very clearly. He felt the pain of others as if it were his own. But when he glanced up, he saw something that suddenly made him much more lucid. A potted plant whirled past and Kamis eyes followed it. Because it was a very familiar potted plant. "... senzu..."

Without hesitation Kami dropped Vegeta into Bardocks arms and, still hanging on to the other mangled Saiyan, threw his free arm out. The green limb stetched, growing until he'd grabbed the senzu plant and then retracting to a normal length. Kami didn't waste any time explaining, he simply force fed the mangled Saiyan a senzu bean and then did Vegeta the same favor.

"Owwww..." Raditz was the first to start recovering. Kami had left Raditz here earlier to ensure that Piccolo Junior didn't escape from limbo.

Kami reclaimed Vegeta and dumped Raditz into Bardocks arms. The god pressed something on his wooden staff - that Bardock still held - and stepped back. Raditz and Bardock vanished. There was transportation magic in the staff. Kami had been saving it, letting the staff charge up. He hoped the spell was strong enough to work as he'd intended.

He turned his attention to Vegeta, who was only just beginning to come around. Kami pressed a green hand to Vegetas bandaged forehead and left the Saiyan Prince with a very clear idea of what had to be done before attaching Vegeta to an artifact that Mister Popo had designed. It looked like a simple bracelet, Kami had been wearing it. The artifact was what had allowed Kami to enter hell without going through Lord Enmas office first. Thus as soon as the bracelet was activated, Vegeta also vanished.

And now that the mortals were out of the area... Finally it was safe to begin.

_Catch!_ Kami thought at his evil twin. A senzu bean flashed through the air.

The sphinx tried to intercept it but missed and Daimio didn't have to be told what senzu were for. Having made a speedy recovery, the demon hesitated between attacks. _Any particular reason that you're saving me? We're not life-bound anymore._ Daimio had never been one to mince words.

_Junior is. Find him. Quickly._ Kami instructed. _It's the only way that either of you will survive._

Daimio was too busy dodging sphinx claws to understand the situation but Lord Enma had also heard their thoughts. The giant ogre shook his head. "No. You will not survive this time Kami. I am tired of your constant disregard for my authority. I am tired of your Earthlings breaking the rules. You are a poor role model to them. I judge you unfit to remain Earths Guardian."

It wasn't even a threat, it was a statement. A verbal pink slip. Lord Enma was confident in both his ability and his right to do this.

The rainbow sky had gone dark around Kami while Lord Enma was speaking. A thin red line, nearly six feet in length, had appeared behind him. The sphinx suddenly tensed and backed away. The line grew wider and rotated, gaining depth and shape as it turned... Two glowing red eyes the shape of slanted diamonds hung over Kami. Above and all around them, the thick dark green coils of the dragon unraveled. Shenlong blinked, yawned and shook himself awake.

Kami was glowing soft green now and even as he began to fade upwards, he smiled benevolently at Lord Enma. "I have remembered who I am. You have no authority over me."

Lord Enma had been prepared for a renegade minor god. He had been prepared to deal with Saiyan warriors and Namekian demons. But a Holy Dragon... That, he had not been prepared for. And to make matters worse... Kami was fusing with it... Lord Enma gawked at the sight. He had no idea what Kamis motives were but he had the sinking feeling that he would be learning in the near future.


	12. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 12**

Uranai Baba blinked, squinted, rubbed her eyes and arced an eyebrow. As soon as she could believe her senses, she smirked. "Forget higher authories!" She cackled and rolled back her sleeves. "We have incoming."

IT WOULD SEEM SO. Korin agreed.

This was better. This was more comfortable. Death had been on Earth long enough to be easy to talk with but the higher gods - Time, Space and The Universe - as far as Uranai Baba knew, they were all more abstract. None of them spoke any human languages. How could you talk to someone like that? It might just be a waste of effort.

That was why magic had come into being among mortals in the first place. The mortals hadn't always been able to count on the gods to fix things and so the mortals had found a way to take care of situations themselves. While The Apocalypse was currently beyond Uranai Babas ability to fix with magic, she had figured out the spells for reincarnation.

"Uh..." She faltered, dropping her hands to her sides. There were two new presences on the astral plane and Kami had stamped both of them. Uranai Baba couldn't ignore the request of someone who'd been a friend for over three hundred years but she had never reincarnated more than one person at a time. There were too many risks. "... What the heck is Kami thinking?"

BAIT. Korin smiled. THEY ARE VERY STRONG. THEY WILL BE HUNTED FOR THEIR POWER.

"... hangon..." Uranai Baba coughed, offended. Reincarnation was not an easy spell to cast. She didn't like to think that her energy would be drained for something worthless. "So what you're implying is that _IF_ I go to all the effort of reincarnating them, they will just get killed?"

BASICALLY.

"Doesn't that seem kind of stupid and redundant? Not to mention unethical?"

Korin actually laughed. YOU MORTALS...

"... I'm not gonna do it if there's no point." Uranai Baba folded her arms stubbornly. With her sleeves rolled back, it was a gesture that made her wristwatch easily visible. Her watch had always acted a bit strange due to her personal aura but lately the watch had been acting even more strange than usual. Currently, her watch appeared to contain a very small two-dimensional live hamster running in an exercise wheel. Uranai Baba frowned at it. "Even if I thought this was good idea, it looks like Time is still a few bricks short of a wall."

Reincarnation was a timed spell. Typically Uranai Baba could reincarnate a person for up to twenty four hours. But if time was out of whack then the spell might last for days or it might last for minutes. There was no way to be sure.

Her frown deepened as she noticed something else. _Gah!_ One of the presences hadn't even died on Earth! She'd never reincarnated someone that hadn't died on Earth before!

Mentally, something clicked into place. _... oh..._

NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

"Yes. Got it." Uranai Baba poked Death. "But you're going to help me."

Korin flattened his ears back and sweatdropped. REINCARNATION IS NOT...

"Do you WANT The Universe to end or something?" Uranai Baba snapped, practically jumping up and down with agitation. "You're DEATH for crying out loud! You HAVE to know about reincarnation!"

NO, I DON'T. Korin was a shade defensive. REINCARNATION INVOLVES RETURNING TO LIFE. WHY WOULD I WANT TO KNOW HOW TO UNDO MYSELF?

"Because it beats the alternatives!"

MAYBE FOR YOU!

Uranai Baba suddenly paused in mid-argument, a dangerous glint of inspiration flickering through her eyes as she stood back and reappraised Korin. She was the one person on Earth that could stare at Death and make him nervous. "Did I just hear you say... that Death could be undone?"

Korins fur bristled. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT REINCARNATION.

The witch hardly seem to hear him now. Her magic-soaked braincells were thinking unnatural thoughts. Uranai Baba was beginning to realize exactly why the tiny leather pouch labeled _'in case of The Apocalpyse'_ had contained catnip. It had indeed been meant to summon Death. But the more Uranai Baba thought about it, the more certain she became of one thing: the tiny leather pouch had been stored inside of Lunar University for a reason. A single magical reason. A single, magical and potentially Apocalypse-solving reason.

"Korin..." Uranai Baba said quietly, "Can Death die?"

Silence.

Eventually Korin sighed. LETS CALL THAT PLAN B.

* * *

The darkness of night only made it worse. Gohan couldn't actually see the landscape blurring past outside the car window but his sense of touch was making up for his lack of vision. Of course, the car engine was huge and powerful - it was hard not to feel embedded into the chair.

It was even harder not to power up. How could Mrs. Briefs see where they were going? What if they were on a collision course with something? Would they even see it before they hit it? Would they even feel the impact? For Gohan the whole experience was positively nerve-wracking. Not just the dizzying feeling that he could be falling into a bottomless abyss at high speeds but the terrifiying feeling that he had his eyes wide open and it wasn't making any difference.

Infant Trunks snored. The Saiyan part of Gohans brain grumpily resolved to smack the kid one day. Provided that any of them survived the car ride.

_Ignorance is bliss. As long as you aren't responsible for anything._ Muttered the most recent voice in Gohans head.

Gohan tried to ignore the disturbing sensation that something was carefully picking his brain apart as if his memory could be viewed in roughly the same way as a photo albumn. But the sensation was causing Gohan to have rather a lot of random half-flashbacks and he was getting annoyed by it. _When did I get a third voice in my head anyway?_ The ten year old mentally demanded, his Saiyan and human sides thinking in unison for once. _I've got two already and that's more than enough!_

_Uhm..._ The tingling sensation in his brain hesitated as if considering its options. _You've been kinda stressed lately, huh?_

Gohan might have facefaulted if he hadn't been embedded into his seat. _That would only be the biggest understatement in my life!_ The boy scowled at his reflection in the rearview mirror. _So you're stress-induced, hmmm? Great. I must be going crazy._

_Probably just a phase._ The third mental voice remarked dryly and something went back to rifling through the contents of Gohans brain. _I'm sure that you'll grow out of it._

_AARGH!_ Gohan clenched his fists as the jumble of flashbacks resumed. _If I'm not dying then my life should NOT be passing before my eyes!_ Suddenly Gohan paled and, blushing, hid his face in his hands. _Especially not THAT part of my life!_

_Is that YOU? Wow. Looks more like a..._

Gohan mentally screamed then did the metaphysical equivalent of snatching the photo albumn away and burying it somewhere secure.

_Jeez. Touchy._

_... wait a sec..._ The human part of Gohans mind was figuring out something important. The third voice didn't have his memories. The third voice had called him 'you' instead of 'I'. Why would anything that was truly a part of his own brain refer to him in third person? Maybe he was going crazy but after everything else that he'd managed to keep his sanity through, that didn't seem likely. Gohan came to a conclusion that he didn't like. _... this can't be happening..._

Chaozu hadn't given him a power boost. There really was a faint ki signature attached to Gohans own. And... it had been reading his mind... and... just what else could it do?

"You feeling okay, hon?" Mrs. Briefs gave Gohan a sideways look that he was sure most people reserved for mental patients.

"I've felt better." Gohan admitted. It was one thing to have listened to ghost stories. It was quite another to be haunted.

"Just hang in there, hon." Mrs. Briefs returned her full attention to the route they were flying, "Your house isn't much further."

Gohan had never thought about ghosts much before. He'd never wanted to. He'd known a lot of people that had died and he'd hoped that death was the end of it - at least until the person was reincarnated with a wish. But Gohan had always been comforted by the idea that the dead could rest in peace. Or study martial arts in peace. Whatever. Just so long as the dead were happy and in the afterlife and...

Without words, the faint presence got across the idea that it had been alive once too. It wished it could rest in peace. And it was sorry about the mind-reading thing but it had just been trying to figure out what the situation was.

_Well obviously I don't KNOW what the entire situation is. What ten-year-old kid ever knows the whole situation?_ Gohan thought bitterly, frustrated by his own limits as much as anything else. He hadn't relaxed his posture at all and his body was outlined in a very thin veil of neon orange energy.

After mentally bracing himself for all the possible answers, Gohan continued. _As long as we're stuck together, you might as well tell me who you are._

The presence contemplated this with mild surprise because Gohan hadn't recognized the ki signature yet. Then the ghost allowed itself to remember that he had only met Gohan once or twice, in passing and before battles. So his name probably wouldn't mean much to the kid. Although actually, the odds were high that if the kid had heard anything about him then it had probably involved the word 'assassin'.

Tenshinhan decided that it could be a bad idea to introduce himself by name. _Guess I'm your guardian ghost. That's all._

* * *

What happens when you cross a Namekian warrior with a Holy Dragon? It sounded like the start of a bad joke. This couldn't be happening and yet... Daimio wasn't completely surprised. He'd always privately wondered who had gotten the better deal three hundred years ago. True, he'd gotten all the strength. But Kami had kept most of the memories. And some part of Daimio had always wanted to remember...

It didn't matter now. Kami had remembered and it was making Daimio remember too. The two of them were not the complete set. That's what Kami had remembered.

Lord Enma and the blue sphinx were both tangled in dragon coils, being held out of the way. Kami and Shenlong were still fusing with deliberate slowness. For a reason. The increase in power was substantial. Daimio could sense it. He could sense something else too. _There!_

Daimio snatched at the air and pulled what looked like a younger, much more injured version of himself back into existence. _Junior._

He'd never actually met this Namek before. Yet the older demon couldn't help feel a touch of pride. Daimio had created many 'children' but Piccolo Daimio Junior had been the only one that he'd given his own name to. This was the cream of the crop, this was his legacy. The rest of Daimios creations had basically been drones. Junior had been the only one created to outlive and avenge his sire.

_... you did kind of mess that part up._ Daimio mentally sighed. It was hard to get mad at someone who was your mirror image. Or rather, at someone who would have been your mirror image if they hadn't been crumpled up like a piece of paper and bleeding all over the place.

Bandages were not going to do much good at this stage. And there weren't any healers or senzu. The one thing keeping Junior from non-existence was the fact that he was energy-bound to Kami. And Kamis power was soaring off the scale. Thus Juniors strength had also increased - but only a little. Without a doubt, Juniors own power increase would have been more noticable if he wasn't dying.

Kami was reclaiming his divinity. His full-fledged divinity. The moment that Kami and Shenlong were fused, Junior would probably lose the ki-bond and cease to exist. Although... There was a way to save Junior.

_You sneaky, scheming, manipulative bastard._ Daimio thought seriously.

_From you, that's a compliment._ Kami retorted. He was nothing more than a green orb of light now, fading upwards but his thought gave the impression that he was grinning.

_Exactly. Didn't realize you had it in you._ Daimio smirked. _You know, actually... Junior did all right. You made him a bit angelic, he made you a bit evil. That's good enough avenging I suppose. For an amateur anyway._

AHEM, Shenlong was blurry around the edges, a bit greener in the scales and whiter in the eyes but otherwise the dragon was retaining his shape. I HATE TO RUSH THINGS...

"Oh. Right. Of course." Daimio was much calmer than he'd ever been. He finally felt avenged. It was strange how easy it was to make the right decision once you felt avenged. He couldn't just abandon his legacy after all. "Tell me this though you ugly lizard, whose butt will you be kicking?"

Shenlong grinned in a friendly but disturbing lots-of-pointy-sharp-teeth way. JUST ABOUT EVERYONES.

Daimio was glowing now and surrounded by a sizeable dark violet aura. "Figures." He chuckled, placing a hand on Juniors chest. "I would have to miss a good fight."

Namekian style fusion is anything but slow. Daimio vanished in a flash of black-green energy.

* * *

It was freezing and that was an understatement. It took Vegeta a few moments to recognize hell. He was in Super Saiyan mode - and borderline Super Saiyan 2 after having survived the wrath of the Saiyan Army - just trying to stay warm but the ice under his feet wasn't even melting. The air was barely warm enough to prevent his blood from turning solid.

From the looks of things, everyone else in the frozen hell seemed to be having the same problems. It was a torture and hell wouldn't let them die.

The Icejins were the only ones still moving. Vegeta recognized that Freezia was in his fourth form - since Freezia wasn't a cyborg anymore in hell - and King Kold appeared to be in his fifth form. Along with a handful of other Icejins, they were going ballastic in their attempts to escape.

It occurred to Vegeta that there had been another sort of transformation. The mental sort. If the Icejins had been capable of thinking coherantly, they probably would have noticed him by now. There was no style or grace or method to their attacks. Just raw primitive outrage. As if they were hardly aware of what they were doing. Like they had reverted to being wild animals.

The idea that Kami had left in Vegetas brain waved a red flag.

Saiyans had a primitive transformation too. The were-monkey transformation. It increased a Saiyans power by a factor of ten but it also made them bigger targets. Easier to hit. And Vegeta was one of the only Saiyans capable of triggering it.

In death, the Saiyan Army had become larger and stronger than ever. Every member could go Super Saiyan or beyond. They'd all kept their tails but... Vegeta had to doubt that any of them would survive the sudden increase to ten times their own power. Few Saiyans had ever trained in were-monkey form, it simply wasn't convenient.

Vegeta glared out at the Saiyan Army that had disowned him. He didn't smirk, which was unusual for him. He wore the same grim businesslike expression he'd worn at formal funerals. Letting go of the past was not always easy but it was high time to put his ancestors to rest, once and for all. Maybe even take down a few Icejins in the process.

An orb of white light began to take shape over the center of Vegetas still-bandaged palm. For once, Vegeta was glad that his tail had never regrown.

* * *

" - what the hell...?" Piccolo didn't have organized memories of anything that had happened to him recently. Something about robots and death and then Raditz had been there. Only this version of Raditz had been capable of going Super Saiyan and...

And since when had his own ki level more than tripled?

Kami and Daimio were gone but Piccolo didn't realize this because he hadn't known that either of them had been there a few moments ago. He did wonder where Lord Enma and the blue sphinx had gone but there was no trace of them. There _was_ a cow-horned helmet similiar to the one that Lord Enma had always worn swirling through the limbo now but Piccolo didn't notice it.

Piccolo sat up slowly, dazed but otherwise fine. No scratches or anything. He flinched at the sight of the black robes he was wearing. The garments were oddly familiar even though he'd never worn anything like them. It was a bit creepy.

None of it made sense. But then again nor did the fact that he was now looking up at Shenlong. Except Shenlong seemed larger and greener. And the dragon had white eyes and a white underside.

WE ARE ALMOST THERE. Shenlong informed him, the voice booming even though the mouth didn't move. BRACE YOURSELF.

Piccolos bewildered brain was replaying a single phrase like a record whose needle was stuck. "... what the h-"

The dragon slammed into him. It was a sensation comparable to being hit by a large train at full speed and then having the train run through you while it ran you over at the same time.

_Junior, be content._ The knowledge coursed through his badly disoriented mind and circulated though his nervous system, numbing everything. It wasn't a voice or a thought but more of a feeling, a sudden understanding. _You have always felt incomplete and this is why. You were one of the pieces. But now the puzzle comes back together. We were always more than a mere prodigy of the Namekian dragon clan. Once upon a time, before we forgot ourselves, we were The Dragon. We remember. We return._

There was a deafening inhuman screech and before consciousness escaped him again, Piccolo caught sight of a second dragon unraveling above him. Shenlong was still coiling around and through him but the dragon above was impossible to ignore. It was a huge dragon with dark red scales and glowing yellow eyes. Piccolo had never even seen this dragon before but something in his mind - a memory that wasn't entirely his - told him that this was Red Shenlong of the ancient and unused Black Star dragonballs. And Red Shenlong was the last piece of their puzzle.

And then the world went blank.

* * *

The stairway creaked unsteadily and all of heaven trembled. For just the slightest instant something felt different. And by the end of that instant, Yajirobe found his feet suspended nearly a foot above the nearest stair while he was recieving a bearhug that, by all rights, should have caused him paralysis.

The samurai was not used to such displays of affection, he struggled to sound more dignified than embarrassed. "Uhm... Goku... Could ya put me down now please?"

"Sorry." Goku smiled sheepishly and reluctantly complied. He hadn't seen anybody that he'd known in over a year. "It's just good ta see ya! Uhm. Well. Kinda. I mean, it's not good that you're dead but..."

"Thanks, I think." Yajirobe interrupted. "How did you get here?"

Goku blinked. "I died. Remember? Heart disease."

"I meant HERE. The stairway."

"Oh. That. Teleported." Goku frowned, staring at his hands with concern. He shook his head and dropped his hands to his sides. "But it's on again."

"On again?" Yajirobe hated to be an echo but this might be important.

"Yea. Didn't you feel that a second ago? The filter was off."

"I felt something but..." Yajirobe organized his thoughts. "Is that what it means? You can't teleport now?"

"That's one of the things." Something dark and tortured passed through the depths of Gokus eyes. "Why did they send me here?"

Living around Korin meant being able to solve some riddles. Yajirobe was decent at it. So. Heaven was filtered. That made sense. You probably couldn't have a perfect paradise if spirits could cause weapons to materialize. But ultimately that meant that there was no fighting. And sending a warrior that didn't know how to do much else to a place where he couldn't even train... It might have been heaven but Goku was obviously feeling punished.

"You can't even power up with the filter on, huh?"

Goku sounded much older than he usually did. "Can't even swear about it."

He shifted from one foot to another, stretched his wings out behind him and tried to explain. "Yaji... It's like they block everything here. Cause they don't want to offend anyone. And so spirits get to the point where they just don't care anymore, just don't want anything anymore. Can't even feel anything anymore. They turn into clouds and just drift forever. It's miserable. Peaceful. But miserable."

Goku bowed his head and spoke softly in a tone that managed to sound lost, confused and trapped all at once. Clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke. "I don't wanna be here."

There was a short reverant silence.

_How strange that they can give angels wings..._ Yajirobe thought, _but no freedom to fly with them._

The message he'd been trying to deliver from Korin was suddenly making a whole lot more sense.

"It'll be okay." Yajirobe nudged the younger warrior, bringing them both out of their momentary funks. "Any idea where this filter is though? We need to turn it off."

* * *

Five hundred years ago, a Namekian child had landed on Earth. A strong child, the prodigy of the Namekian dragon clan. He had created the Black Star dragonballs first, putting a lot of his spirit and power into the process. Voluntarily diluting his strength with the hopes of recovering his damaged memory. But the Black Star dragonballs had come out a bit tainted, a bit too hazardous to use. So the artifacts had been locked away and forgotten. Red Shenlong had never been summoned.

Three hundred and ten years ago, in order to rise to the rank of Earths God, the Namek child had split himself in two. This had resulted in both Kami, who was supposively pure good and Piccolo Daimio, who was taken to be pure evil. And shortly after Daimio had been sealed into the denshi jar, Kami had created his own set of dragonballs. Thus Shenlong contained a piece of Kamis spirit and a share of his power.

Fourteen years ago, Daimio had been released from the denshi jar. Daimio had created several lesser Nameks to run errands for him. All his drones had died, allowing Daimio to catch up to and reabsorb them in hell. But in his last living moments, Daimio had put a spark of his own spirit into the creation of Junior.

Red Shenlong... Kami... Daimio... Shenlong... Junior... A shattered soul was finally repairing itself. The pieces were becoming whole again. The original Eternal Dragon was rising. His name - and his realm - was Miracles.

Dragons had always been considered eccentric, divine ones even moreso.

* * *

Being a ghost, Tenshin sensed them first. Even before the car was parked. Two ghostly kis. One of which was becoming less ghostly.

Gohan had bolted from the vehicle and Mrs. Briefs - who must have been a professional aircar racer at some point in her life - was lifting Trunks from his car seat. Then Gohan noticed them. Or rather, he noticed the confused person that had materialized in his front yard. And that was all it took.

"DAD!"

Bardock was knocked off his feet. He blinked, glanced down at the kid that was hugging him so hard that it impaired his breathing and felt further confused. _But... He doesn't look anything like me..._

_Uhm, Gohan?_ Tenshin had realized what Gohan hadn't. _I think it might be wise to let go of that stranger._

A second warrior materialized and looked down at the scene with mild exasperation. Gohan was lifted by the scruff of his neck. "Nephew," Raditz growled, "this is your _grandfather_."

Gohan spent a full two seconds staring in terrified disbelief at his uncle before he screamed at the top of his lungs and unleashed a large energy blast.


	13. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 13**

Mortals had something called money. It had started when merchants had begun to have serious trouble with assigning value to things. Deep philosophical questions had arisen. How many clay pots were really equal to one sheep? Did it depend on the quality of the sheep or quality of the clay pots or both? How did you make fractional change out of anything without losing value in the process? Exactly how did you figure out what a quarter of a duck was? And which quarter did you offer anyway?

There were so many factors and so many variables that money had been invented to give consistancy to the whole idea of trade. Prices had never been stable, merchants could change and products themselves tended to vary. Money had become the constant, the standard. It was convenient. Everyone wanted money so everyone would trade for it and nobody had to decide how many spears were equal to one elephant anymore.

Immortals had a currency of their own. Souls. And of course immortal souls were worth more than mortal ones. Which was actually a good thing for mortals.

Fourteen years ago, a green demon named Daimio had been on his way to conquering Earth. Chaozu had died. Daimio had been defeated. Four years ago, Vegeta and Nappa had landed on Earth. Chaozu had died. Nappa had followed suit, Vegeta had changed sides and Earth had survived the encounter.

It was a subtle pattern but a terribly effective one with a very long history. Chaozu knew his soul worth and had used it often. Trading in his life for a bit guaranteed that billions of mortals would survive whatever he had allowed to kill him. Whether it was a disease, a natural disaster or a man-made disaster - as long as Chaozu died from it, mortals would live.

This was why Chaozu was the youngest of his divine siblings. He'd died a _lot_. His death didn't stop everything though. His death just made the hazards slightly less fatal. Disasters would still do damage and diseases would still have to be researched before cures were found. But he had always tried to leave it so that the damages done could be repaired. If mortals bothered to repair them.

As long as the threat was a valid large-scale one, Chaozu didn't mind doing this for mortals. Mortals usually only got to live once after all. Plus he'd become psychic from dying a lot and that had been handy. But most important - his death always indirectly protected his realm. Chaozu needed mortals for his realm.

Death, Survival, Love and Miracles were his elder siblings. Time and Space were his parents. The Universe was an abstract grandparent. They were all very influential gods but thanks to mortals, Chaozu had been able to sneak up and redefine most of his relatives realms. He wasn't incredibly strong or anything, he was just very very stubborn and he had talent for being overlooked. It was positively amazing what an immortal could do when no one was paying attention.

He could have let the androids kill him yesterday. It might have saved South Capital City. But yesterday he'd been psychic and the timeline hadn't been blurry. Chaozu'd had the distinct feeling that it wasn't meant to be. That the androids were just the tip of the iceberg. That the universe in general might need him to prevent something else.

He'd had no idea it was going to be this.

* * *

Time stood unsteadily. Grinning like a maniac, the sort who knows you can't escape. With a sinster laugh - that, to mortals, would have sounded like a broken windchime - the god stepped closer.

Puar was down to two lives now and Oolong was dying slowly from the poisons on the needles that he'd stabbed himself with. The voodoo was working but regrettably, it was working much more effectively on Oolong than it was on Time. Such were the risks of shapeshifting to be the voodoo doll.

In the distance, a low rumbling. No one noticed it yet.

Master Roshi was too terrified to think straight. He stood protectively in front of both the weary shapeshifters with his wooden staff clutched tightly in one hand. But it had been so long since he'd cast any spell that didn't involve pulling a magazine out of thin air... Roshi couldn't think clearly under this much pressure, couldn't concentrate. The words weren't coming and even if they had been, he wouldn't have cast a spell. Stammering was dangerous. Spells could backfire if you were stammering.

The rumbling became thunderclaps. Approaching with great speed.

Master Roshi was standing on air because there was no ground to stand on. Both the shapeshifters were floating. To one side of the main confrontation, a blur of purple was orbiting the steadily-more-intact time machine. Mister Popos flying carpet. The carpet had been intelligent enough to understand spoken commands and magical enough to warp in and out of existence. So they had told the carpet to fix the time machine. And it was. The flying carpet apparently understood the principles of time travel. Not much of a surprise considering that the flying carpet was probably capable of time travel.

The thunderclaps grew louder, nearer. Rhythmic. Hoofbeats.

Time hefted the sword and, grinning horribly all the while, made a noise comparable to a bell tolling. Then the god lunged forward, striking out with the blade. Time had intended to kill his mortal visitors. Instead he abruptly buried his sword, up to the hilt, into the shoulder of one of his own children.

Several things happened at once.

All across The Universe every concieveable device for measuring time - calendars, clocks, sundials, etc - began to disentegrate. Creatures living in cities experienced a sudden inexplicable desire to riot. They weren't angry with anyone in particular but generally the masses just suddenly wanted to run about shouting obsenities, breaking things and setting fire to anything that got in their way. And somewhere on Earth...

* * *

Somewhere on Earth, far from any city, a temple shook. Glass shattered, stone crumbled and pretty much everything else fell over. Most the temple residents braced themselves in doorways. When the ground was stable again, they began dashing around and calling out to each other. Checking to make sure everyone was okay. Trying to decide what sort of omen the localized earthquake had been.

A tourist screamed and pointed.

It was pale grey statue covered in dust. Large and strange and lifelike. The statue depicted a horse that had elephant-style feet and tail. A horse made mythical by the single horn protruding from its forehead. The giant unicorn statue had sat, often overlooked despite its size, in the back of the temple for longer than anyone mortal could remember. But now every set of eyes were fixed upon it.

Thin streams of crimson leaked from a fresh gash in the ancient stone. The statue was bleeding.

One of the more senior monks had the presence of mind to remain outwardly calm. These particular monks were supposed to be accustomed to supernatural phenomena. If the tourists - to say nothing of the worshippers - started to suspect that these sorts of events weren't commonplace at the temple then the temple would lose most of its income. Guided thus by their seniors, the monks did their best to seem unphased.

A handful of the temple residents walked around the immense statue. They avoided the blood and dusted the statue off in places. They were looking for a name. All statues had at least the name of the god which the statue depicted carved on it somewhere. The monks felt that if they had a name to work with then perhaps they could figure out why the statue was bleeding. More importantly, if they had a name then they could cast spells on the statue to make it behave normally again.

Chaozu had thought of this eons ago. Before abandoning his physical body in order to escape the temple, he'd put his most formal name on it as sort of a warning - so that if anyone tried to injure him then they'd know who they were dealing with. And because the signature was meant to serve as a warning, Chaozu had kept it updated. Which meant that when the monks finally did locate his name, they were actually able to read it.

The signature was a single word. Civilization.

* * *

The Immortal Phoenix reeled and sparked, still possessed and dizzy with power. Civilization had always limited Love. So while Chaozu was somewhere reeling in pain and most other immortals were reeling in shock, Feng felt as if massive burdens were being lifted from her.

Unikame drifted below, swimming across the surface of the ocean. Survival flinched at the sensation of Civilizations pain but half the orbs of pink link were circling Unikames head. He remained possessed.

Fengs spirit was slightly more visible now. She had absorbed the mortal souls that had been haunting South Capital City. Her physical body - a monsterous bundle of soaking feathers and broken bones - was draped across Unikames shell. Feng had begun healing. The more power Feng absorbed into her soul, the sooner she would return to full health. With just a little a more power she would be strong enough to reclaim her physical form.

Just a little more power...

A continent loomed on the northern horizon. Seen at night it was a mere dark mass of land rising out of the sea, decorated here and there with a tangle of lights to indicate distant clusters of buildings. There was power there. Feng could sense it. The abnormally strong energy signature that she'd been aware of before was now in the company of others. Foolish mortals. They didn't deserve such power. Feng looked forward to taking it away from them.

Unikame was steadily advancing on the location. While Unikame was not swimming quickly, he was a giant turtle and was thus able to cover large distances without much effort. It has to do with stride - a regular human would have to take several steps to cover the same distance as a giant human. That sort of thing. Unikame was a mythical universe turtle. From his perspective, any distance that could be measured in less than lightyears was small.

Fengs flapped her wings as they reached the coast. Her broken wing had healed enough to allow flight. Feng flew inland.

* * *

"Definitely has your temperment." Bardock remarked, dusting himself off as he stood up. He couldn't help noticing how much his eldest son and grandson resembled each other.

Raditz arced an eyebrow at his father then scowled at Gohan and then shook his head. "We weren't introduced under the best of circumstances."

The last couple days had been very bizarre for Raditz and he had the sinking feeling that the trend wasn't about to change anytime soon. The most recent bizarre event was Gohans attack. The kid had aimed a very large energy blast at point blank range - and missed. For reasons that Raditz didn't understand, the attack had done a perfect ninety degree turn in midair. So instead of slamming into Raditz, the energy beam had shot straight up into the sky before fading away harmlessly.

_In case you've forgotten,_ a certain ghost informed Gohan, _that IS your house they're standing in front of. Speaking of which..._

Gohan knew what was next. He could sense ki. He didn't have to open his eyes or look up to know who was standing on the doorstep of his home. He knew that his mother was staring at them.

The two newly-reincarnated Saiyans stared back at ChiChi, puzzled as to why she was staring so intently at them. She stared at their tails in particular because she hadn't been aware of the fact that adult Saiyans had tails. Gokus tail had fallen out before he'd turned 19 and Gohan had lost his at age 6. ChiChi also noticed the various scars that Bardock had acquired and so she didn't mistake him for someone else. Her eyes settled on the sight of her ten year old son. Gohan was being held off the ground by the scruff of his neck and was refusing to acknowledge her presence.

The silence grew increasingly awkward.

ChiChi got the very clear impression that Gohan wanted her to leave for the sake of her own safety. But at this point, she didn't care all that much about her safety. Everything that she had left to live for was right here - her son, the house, the memories. If anyone was going to fight here then ChiChi was going to be a part of it and nobody could tell her otherwise. Her expression was determined and her entire stance became protective.

Bardock recognized that he was on the recieving end of the same kind of stare that mother bears gave to anything that threatened their cubs. Which meant... If the kid was his grandson and this lady was the kids mother then... _Daughter-in-law?_ She didn't seem like much of a warrior but she was apparently able to survive living around Saiyans. That was good enough. Bardock didn't care to find out what else she was capable of. He nudged Raditz. "Put the kid down."

Raditz had become preoccupied with squinting inquisitively at infant Trunks during this time so he took a moment to comply with the suggestion. Trunks had an energy signature that was reminding Raditz of someone else he'd known - someone royal - but Raditz could hardly believe what he was sensing.

"There's no way..." Raditz stepped over to Mrs. Briefs and poked at Trunks, who instantly responded by growling and biting Raditzs hand. Which was, in Raditzs mind, exactly how the brats of Saiyan royalty behaved. He sighed wearily. "Nevermind."

"That's strange. He doesn't usually bite people." Mrs. Briefs observed nervously as she tried to pry Trunks off. "Kids don't seem to like you much, huh?"

Raditz scowled at Mrs. Briefs and wondered if she was Trunks mother.

The sky flashed gold. Gohan had taken the opportunity to power up. He was hovering two feet off the ground, encased in a sphere of golden-white energy and struggling to keep the power from accidentally demolishing anything. Bardock and Raditz each expressed their surprise at the change in alien languages. They hadn't reached Super Saiyan levels until after their deaths so they were reasonably startled that a ten year old kid was doing something that neither of them had achieved before age thirty.

Gohan narrowed his aquamarine eyes. He wasn't entirely sure what to think of his reincarnated relatives at the moment so he didn't spare much thought for them. Currently Gohans main concern was protecting his mother. "I don't know why you're here..." He began in a threatening tone.

"We don't know either." interrupted Bardock. He had no desire to fight anyone that might be a relative. "Kami didn't explain."

Gohan blinked, caught off guard by this response. "Kami?"

"Tall green guy. Guess he was the god around here. We did have his cane a moment ago, don't know where it is now."

"Don't look at me." Raditz grumbled, rubbing at the fresh set of toothmarks on his hand. "The only green guy that I've seen lately called himself Piccolo and he was trying to kill me. Again."

"Piccolo?" Gohan couldn't help but sound skeptical. The situation wasn't making any sense to him.

ChiChi was the one who voiced the question they were all thinking. "What is going on here?" She had caught enough of the conversation to understand that the two adult saiyans were supposively relatives of Gokus but the rest was confusing her.

Mrs. Briefs, who was slightly better informed, frowned. "Gohan hon - didn't you say earlier that Piccolo was dead?"

"Uhm..." Gohan was wilting under the weight of his mothers stare. He couldn't meet her eyes. "Yea. He is."

_You didn't tell your own mother about the androids?_ Thought an upset guardian ghost.

_I meant to! I just hadn't gotten around to it yet._ Gohan sighed. _I've been sort of busy._

"Perhaps it would be beneficial," ChiChi spoke softly with a tone of forced politeness, "if we all went inside, talked a bit and got things sorted out."

It was more of an order than a suggestion. ChiChi gave her son a _no super saiyans in the house_ glance in addition to the more standard _we WILL talk about this later_ glance before stepping through the doorway.

"Sounds like a wonderful idea. Why don't I make us some coffee?" Mrs. Briefs offered, following ChiChi indoors.

There was another moment of awkward silence while each adult Saiyan tried to remember the last time they'd entered a building instead of just blowing it up.

Bardock paused to give his grandson an apologetic smile. "Uhm... If we've gotten you into trouble..."

"Don't apologize." Gohan still had his head bowed. He sounded much older than he was and very tired. "It's just been that kind of life." As he drifted indoors, he added. "Either kill us or come in. I guess I don't care which. It probably doesn't make much difference."

While Raditz and Bardock hadn't known Gohan all that long, this last remark still struck them as seeming out of place. A certain ghost agreed with their assessment.

In the night sky above them there was a faint white line. On the astral plane it looked more like a ghostly phoenix. With a flourish of crimson embers, Feng landed beside the Son House.

* * *

Contained within the shattered depths of the Room of Spirit and Time was a truly disturbing scene. Three terrified mortals in various stages of dying. One angry god howling in pain as his attack backfired. And kneeling between them, framed against the boundless darkness, a silent silver unicorn with a sword handle sticking out of one shoulder.

The attitude of the unicorn was by far the most disturbing part of the eerie scene. For the creature was still alive but seemed resigned to dying. The unicorn made no effort to save itself. It didn't scream or get up or fight back. It didn't even try to remove the sword.

Violence, states an ancient proverb, is the last resort of the truly civilized. Violence can undo civilization. Thus Civilization himself preferred death to fighting. This was why Chaozu had always had the tendacy to befriend assassins.

The unicorn flattened his ears back. He liked quick deaths where there was a minimum of pain, regrets and drama. Chaozu just wanted to die, get it over with and get on with the afterlife. But the sword had struck his spirit at entirely the wrong angle. His physical body was just going to have to bleed to death. Which it would do, if only the monks in the temple on Earth would quit casting healing spells at him.

Most creatures waiting for Death do not come off as bored and impatient. The unicorn was both. He ignored the fact that his life was trying to pass before his eyes - he'd already seen it so many times that the show didn't interest him anymore - and decided to do something useful with the remaining moments of this phase of his existance.

He focused on the mortals that would have been obliterated if he hadn't come between them and Time. Logically, he'd saved them. So they shouldn't be endangered anymore. A breath in their direction was all it took to send them back to Earth. Puar, Oolong and Master Roshi vanished before recovering enough to react to what they'd just witnessed.

Time was no longer a concern. The god was fading and staggering away. Without devices like clocks and calendars, Time would become vague. Mortals and immortals alike would lose track of Time until Civilization had recovered. And once Civilization came back... _Time will have changed._ The unicorn yawned and hoped that his parent would change for the better.

Change was good. Civilization planned on doing some change himself. He enjoy altering the disguise of his spirit each time he was reincarnated, just to see what it was like to be something else for a bit. Being humanoid hadn't been too bad so Chaozu contemplated coming back as humanoid again, idly picking out the details in his mind.

A purple rectangle fringed in gold tapped Civilization on the nose. The unicorn blinked at the flying carpet and nearly swatted it away before noticing the machine that sat just beyond. The machine was some sort of hybrid of a rocket and a one-person submarine. Empty but intact.

Civilization snorted at the sight of the Capsule Corp logo. Machines - all machines - were, by default, part of civilization. The realm required the god to be technology literate. Still, Chaozu wasn't quite sure what to make of the time machine and even less certain of what to do with it. Slowly the unicorn stood up, unsteadily at first, and scanned the surrounding area for some trace of a mortal energy signature. Nothing. Time must have destroyed the pilot. There wasn't much that Civilization could do about it without an energy signature to work with.

The flying carpet seemed to understand what was going through the gods mind. Helpful as ever the carpet darted up, wrapped itself around the sword handle and heaved.

* * *

Death had no intention of catching up to Civilization. Korin had other priorities - because Feng had taken the bait. She'd flown inland by herself to hunt down the mortals whose power she craved. Which conveniently left Unikame alone at the coast with Fengs physical body draped across his shell.

While Death had no power over Love, Korin had yet to be defeated by Survival. Deaths plan was simple. Scare Unikame back into the water and then kill him. This would cause Fengs body to be stuck underwater again and hopefully Unikame would no longer be possessed by the prisoners of time.

Korin was a mere streak of white as he sped across the astral plane towards the coast. He hoped the mortals could last long enough against Feng.


	14. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 14**

"There is absolutely no way."

Five words that no one on Earth would have ever expected to hear from Son Goku.

Heaven was filtered and apparently the filter was everywhere. Nobody in heaven knew how to turn the filter off. Most spirits hadn't even thought it was possible to turn the filter off. Goku had been trying to turn it off for the past year without success.

It had taken Yajirobe less than two minutes to reach the conclusion that if heavens filter was everywhere then turning the filter off might require taking heaven apart.

"Even if I could power up," Goku was being perfectly serious, "there are just too many spirits here. I couldn't save them all. And actually, I'm not even sure that any of them want to be saved..." He let the bitter sentiment trail off and shifted the subject. "What makes you think that we'd be able to take heaven apart anyway?"

"We can't." Yajirobe clung to the handrail and waited for the latest set of tremors to fade before he resumed climbing down the delicate wireframe stairs. They were descending now, heading steadily downward. "But I think someone else might."

Goku sighed in frustration, trailing a few steps behind the samurai. A lifetime of saving the world had left him a tad jaded. "Well then let them figure out how to protect the angels cause I have no idea where to even begin."

"Maybe one of the others will know. If we can find them."

This caught Gokus attention, he paused in midstep "... which others?"

"I don't where they are." Yajirobe was stalling. He hated to deliver bad news, especially when he wasn't sure how bad it was.

"Which others?" Goku persisted.

"Look, Goku - honestly I'm not even sure who else is dead. Most of them were still alive when I died. Hurt pretty bad but still alive." The samurai smirked a little at the irony of a passing thought. "Can you believe it? All this trouble over Vegeta. Of all the people in the world that we could have been trying to protect..."

"Sounds like the Earth has become very strange without me."

"Eh. I dunno." Yajirobe countered, "Earth has always been strange. You just made it stranger."

"... Thanks, I think." Goku said dryly, falling back into step.

For a few moments they continued down the stairs without saying anything. Then Goku spoke up again, sounding thoughtful. "So Vegeta is dead?"

Yajirobe nodded.

"Is that why we're going down?"

* * *

A single shadow fell in a place where there had never before been shadows. The shadow continued rising and stretching until the dark coiling silhouette of a massive dragon was framed against a room full of suns.

Mister Popo shaded his face with an arm and smiled up at the creature. "Aha - so you did find the senzu. I was beginning to wonder."

_Yes, thanks. How did you know where to leave it?_ Miracles thought, deliberately communicating with telepathy. The dragons telepathic voice was more informal and less prone to echoing.

"Korin gave me some hints." Mister Popo cracked his knuckles and turned his attention to the sprawling mass of consoles that surrounded Hells Furnance. "Now about this project of yours..."

While the vast multiple suns generated all the heat and power that hell required, the space around the suns was filled with strange half-melted devices for controlling the power. The consoles looked like what could happen if a tornado visited a telephone company, a spaceport and a costume shop - in roughly that order. Acres of tangled wires stretched out in every direction. Walls of switches and dials. Millions of tiny lights flashing in sequence. Numerous strange charms, artifacts and other items were suspended among the wires. It was the sort of technology only immortals could understand.

"The furnance is still overloading but it's been slowed down by the freeze." said Mister Popo. "If we're going to raise hell properly then we'll have to speed things up again. Might take a while to thaw hell out."

The Eternal Dragon grinned mischievously, his slanted eyes gleaming. Wisps of steam rose from the dragons nostrils. _I've changed my mind._

Mister Popo didn't sound overly surprised. "Oh?"

_Too cliche. Everyone's heard of raising hell._ Miracles glided through the air with easy power, encircling a sun in his coils. _What if we did it in reverse?_

"Same results." Mister Popo shrugged. "No waiting."

The sun was shrinking and the dragons entire body was outlined in a veil of sheer white energy. _Good._ Miracles picked up the small sun between his teeth and left Hells Furnance. The remaining suns shuddered in the dragons wake.

* * *

Bardock had experienced enough in his life - and afterlife - to instinctively know when a situation was bad. This insight didn't phase him much at the moment since it just seemed to be common sense. Anytime you were approached by a large mostly-invisible creature, the situation was bad. Bardock didn't yet understand the extent of the threat but he refused to trust anything that he couldn't see.

It wasn't really an attack. The creature, whatever it was, didn't seem to be attacking them so there was no reason to provoke its temper. Bardock just wanted to get an idea of what they were confronting. A lifetime of strange adventures had taught him that invisible things could sometimes still cast shadows. Plus if you managed to startle or distract the invisible creature, sometimes that could make it become visible. So Bardock sent a small sphere of ki speeding in the creatures direction.

The ball of energy burned brightly for a while, traveling through the air before the attack vanished. Nothing had been revealed.

Neither Raditz nor Bardock were skilled at detecting ki. While alive, they had always relied on scouters - lightweight computers that were worn over the eye and that had allowed the wearer to estimate the power level of any creature they were looking at. And while dead, such a skill would have been useless. Hell was too crowded with spirits. Even a warrior talented at ki detection would have been hard pressed to pick out any individual ki signature. So while the adult Saiyan warriors realized that the creature in front of them was both strong and hostile, they couldn't identify how strong or how hostile. Both Bardock and Raditz remained wary. They refused to turn away from the threat.

Which left them open to an attack from behind.

Gohan was still in Super Saiyan mode but his eyes were glazed and his aura was tinted faint pink. He didn't announce his attack, he simply blurred as he launched himself forward.

* * *

There were countless levels of heaven and hell. It hadn't always been this way but The Universe had become very cluttered in the last few hundred millenia.

A sad state of affairs indeed. Creatures wandered aimlessly, some spent their entire lives in search of things like truth and purpose. Searching for things they already had, if only they would wake up and realize it. But simple answers were too simple to be believed and complex answers were too complex to be understood and so the search continued. Mortals honestly believed that they would find the meaning of life - the ultimate cosmic truth - one day and in the meantime, their own lives were passing them by.

Existence, especially mortal existence, had essentially been reduced to an overglorified competition that was called Good vs. Evil.

What this meant was that if someone were to actually count all the levels of heaven then they wouldn't need to count the levels of hell. The number was the same. Heaven and hell had to have an equal number of levels in order to balance each other. The pattern continued. Heros and villians, winners and losers, angels and demons, good luck and bad luck - it all balanced out in the end. Or at least, it used to.

Sentient creatures had gotten so caught up in defining the concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' that they often forgot about the balance. They forgot that you had to have one to have the other. The balance had been slowly slipping away from mortals for eons now. Especially in recent years, the already fragile existence of mortals had become ever more unstable.

The term _apocalypse_ meant _end of the entire universe_. Take note. Apocalypse did not necessarily mean _end of everything contained within the universe_. Sentient creatures were all somewhat egotistical in this regard since they tended to assume that if anything important was going to happen then the event must affect them personally. This was not true. The Universe was perfectly capable of keeling over without affecting anything else, living or dead. It was highly unlikely that such a thing would happen but not impossible.

What was even more unlikely was saving The Universe. Nobody was even sure what exactly The Universe was anymore - how could anyone save it? It would take a miracle.

And perhaps also an immortal engineer.

Mister Popo grinned and reset a series of switches. "Oops." He chuckled and moved on to the next console of Hells Furnance with the intent of repeating his performance.

* * *

The night sky was filled with the golden streaks and rolling thunder of three Super Saiyans battling. Gohan was outnumbered but he was also possessed which made him more reckless. Bardock and Raditz each seemed to be holding back at the moment, they were dodging and defending more than attacking. But if Gohan kept pressing them...

At least the battle had moved away from the Son House. There was that much to be thankful for.

Tenshinhan wasn't completely sure how this had happened - it had all been too fast. When Gohan had slipped, Tenshin'd had to struggle just to keep himself from being possessed as well.

The source of the problem was the phoenix. It was an immense creature with a matching power level that radiated hostility. Tenshin recognized that this was the creature he'd seen earlier, in South Capital City and wondered if it had caused the deaths of the people that had been left in the area. Perhaps the phoenix had turned those people against each other. It seemed to have that intention now. It wasn't attacking anyone directly.

He could, of course, stop the fight. He was, after all, still attached to Gohans ki. What it came down to was a specific question of ethics that would have caused other warriors to hesistate. Tenshinhan, being a practical former-assassin, didn't hesitate. It wasn't in his nature. Assassins who hesitated in life-and-death situations soon found themselves on the death-only side of things. And even while dead, the habits of a lifetime prevailed.

Besides, he had an idea. Hopefully this would work...

Tenshinhan braced himself and powered up. He went through what little was left of his own ki quickly and started drawing off Gohans energy. While Tenshinhan had a decent amount of tolerance to ki, he felt that this was going to test his limits. He knew that if he simply gathered the ki, the attempt would destroy him - there was just too much energy. He had to get rid of it, do something with it.

He aimed an attack at the phoenix. Bardocks earlier ki sphere had gone through the creature before vanishing so apparently the live warriors wouldn't be able to hit the ghostly bird. Tenshinhan was hoping that since he was a ghost himself, his attacks might be able to do a little more damage.

* * *

Elsewhere on Earth, another battle began. A white humanoid cat stood at the edge of a beach facing a massive pitch black turtle. Unikame squinted down to make out his challenger and Korin flattened his ears back.

All gods were, to a certain extent, elemental. Survivals element was water. Scaring Unikame off the beach into the ocean was going to be easy - it was the next bit that had Korin worried. It was harder to kill someone who was in their element. But it had to be done this way because Feng, Love, her element was fire. So as long as her body was stuck in the ocean, the strength of her spirit would be limited.

Deaths element was metal. This was why Korin had brought a certain capsule with him. He tossed the capsule down to release the metallic decoy contained within.

Android 17 found himself staring up at a massive pitch black turtle.

* * *

The stairway of heaven had creaked, tremored, buckled, sagged, waivered and done an assortment of other things that were just as discomforting. Yet the delicate stairway had held together. Then something large, bright and covered in scales tore upwards through the heavens. The staircase snapped like a twig in its wake.

"I don't suppose those wings of yours are actually good for anything?" Yajirobe was starting to feel ill. The spiral staircase dropped away beneath them, falling, taking them down with it - they couldn't see where to. Somewhere far below the drifting cloud layers...

Goku shook his head, not seeming concerned by the situation. "Just ornamental." He stared upward. "Was that a dragon that went past?"

"Can we worry about that later?"

They continued to fall with increasing speed that rendered talking - and screaming - impractical. The cloud layers gradually became less frequent, allowing them to see further below which only made Yajirobes case of vertigo worse.

A few sparse cloud layers later, something changed. The atmosphere felt just a smidge different. Yajirobe noticed it first and Goku, who had been half asleep, caught on quickly. Either the filter was off or they were no longer in heaven.

"Hey...!" With that, Goku was gone. In less than a heartbeat both warriors were standing on a narrow white cobblestone path that wound its way though the clouds. "This looks like Snakes Way!"

"I think it IS Snakes Way."

Yajirobe hadn't said that because frankly, he didn't know. He'd never been on Snakes Way before. Goku blinked and turned to see who had spoken while Yajirobe recovered from the fall.

"YAMUCHA!"

"ack! choking!"

"Sorry." Goku put his friend down. "Uhm. So you were killed too huh?"

"Looks that way." Yamucha sighed, regarding Goku with bewilderment.

"You were on the stairs, weren't you?" Yajirobe accused. "How did you get past the guards?"

"Oh, you mean the ones with the clubs?" Yamucha ducked his head and smiled, a gesture of mild embarrassment. "Well, I dunno why they're baseball fans..." He shrugged absently. "Anyway. What are you guys up to?"

"If we knew, we'd tell you." Yajirobe said and Goku nodded in agreement.

"Ah." Yamucha nodded understanding. "The usual. Uhm..."

"What?"

"It's just that I was traveling with Gohan a moment ago." Yamucha blinked and buried his face in his hands. "And I really shouldn't have said it that way."

Goku had lost all his color and cheerfullness. "Gohan is DEAD?"

"Er. Maybe? I don't know! I was traveling with a different one." Yamucha decided to try to change the subject for Gokus sake. "Hey - on the stairs, was that a dragon that went past?"

* * *

Raditz had survived the destruction of the Saiyan homeworld thirty years ago - that was a fluke. However his survival in general, that was not a fluke. While Raditz had never been an elite Saiyan - never even been close - he'd always been a fairly well-respected warrior within his own social class. Not an easy thing to accomplish.

In a world where strength was everything, Raditz had been living proof that fighting style and clarity of thought might be more important. Given the chance, he could destroy stronger warriors by basically staying calm and turning their own powers against them. Warriors didn't concentrate, that was their problem. They just didn't pay attention. They assumed too much, took too much for granted. Overconfident warriors especially.

Raditz had been killed in exactly this way around six years ago. One bad mood, a bit of underestimating the opponents... It had been a stupid and fatal mistake to make. Raditz wasn't about to make it again.

Between the flurries of attacks, Raditz saw it. He didn't sense it - couldn't sense it - but he saw it. His nephew appeared to be tiring out. The boy seemed to be struggling, ever so slightly, to remain in Super Saiyan mode. But what if it was a trick? Maybe the kid was just trying to lure him into letting his guard down. Worse, maybe the kid was preparing to do some kind of power up. In death Raditz had become aware that there were levels beyond Super Saiyan. He really did not want to find out if his nephew could achieve these levels.

To Gohans credit, it took a series of near-lethal jabs delivered at lightening fast speeds to render him unconscious. And it likely would have taken much more than that if he'd had full control of his own brain.

For a wide variety of personal reasons, Raditz caught his nephew and dumped the kid into a tree at what he estimated to be a relatively safe distance. Then he turned his attention downward.

Though the creature below was mostly-invisible, it was far from silent. A mysterious blur of light in the sky was launching multiple attacks at it - Raditz had never named his own energy attacks so he simply thought of the attacks as being ki beams - and his father... Bardock... had also focused on assaulting the creature.

What seemed to be the curve of the creatures back, that was the most visible piece of it. Then there was a slanted glowing red diamond - an eye perhaps? - and a ring of faint pink orbs. Bardock was aiming for where he thought the creatures heart should be while the mysterious blur of light was attacking the slanted red diamond and the pink orbs. Most of the attacks were simply vanishing. It was hard to tell if any of the attacks were having an affect without being able to see the monster but the creature did sound pained.

Not pained enough, Raditz felt. One thing about being a middle-class Saiyan warrior was that he'd always done his own hunting. Which meant that he'd had to learn to distinguish the various cries of animals. Especially around poisonous creatures, the difference between an upset injured animal and a dying one was significant.

From the sounds of things, the mostly-invisible creature was in pain but it was definitely not dying. Raditz hoped that it wasn't poisonous.

The creature bellowed and sparks flew, smoldering and catching as they came in contact with the plants in the area. Raditz took a moment to rescue his nephew from the now-burning tree.

Hmmm. So the creature could make fire. Perhaps what was needed then... Was water. Or ice. These were the things that had worked against most fire-making creatures that Raditz had ever hunted. Water and ice had not always been readily accessible though. Air, on the other hand...

Fire - and often, also the creatures who made it - would die if deprived of air. It was risky but fire could be smothered. All they had to do was kick up enough dust...

* * *

It was the mortals that were the problem. That's what the majority of the immortals believed anyway. Life had been great before the mortals had come along - life had been simple. Life had been eternal.

Then along had come the mortals with their odd customs, intense emotions and incredibly short lifespans. And ideas, so many fresh ideas. Every immortal had been impacted. Life had gone from being peaceful and predictable to being full of change and controversy. Things that immortals had never even bothered to think about, things that immortals had never needed to invent - suddenly such items had existed in abundance.

It had been amazing to witness and in fact, it still was. The mortals weren't finished. There were - contrary to popular opinion - always new ideas and inventions. Always new discoverys.

The mortals had redefined The Universe itself. To the immortals, The Universe had been little more than an abstract distant relative and a place to live. It was the mortals who had seen The Universe as a place full of questions and so it was the mortals that had set out to find all the answers. Which had been fine at first. But the questions had gotten continually harder as the mortals had become more advanced and thus the balance had started slipping. Mortals liked definite answers, they always looked for definite answers out of habit. The trouble was that not all questions had definite answers.

What was The Universe? And, cosmically speaking, did your place in it matter at all? What was the meaning of life? It was, most mortals thought, the lack of a definite answer to the meaning of life that hurt them.

Immortals saw the situation differently. In their opinion it was the stupid question that was at fault and it was the mortals fault for inventing it. The meaning of life, immortals knew, depended on what had been done with the specific life in question. Yet the mortals had kept searching for a single answer as if a few profound words could cause life in general - and all the living things everywhere - to suddenly make sense.

Against all odds, mortals vastly outnumbered immortals. Mortals lived, died and haunted more pieces of The Universe than immortals had ever bothered to notice. Perhaps the question wasn't so stupid. Maybe the mortals knew something that the immortals didn't. It wouldn't be the first time.

Saving the entire universe was beyond the power of even Miracles. But saving part of The Universe, that was possible. That would be enough.

The Eternal Dragon released the shrunken sun amid the clouds of heaven. With an explosion too loud for sound and too bright for light, the sun collapsed on itself. Moments later, heaven began to do the same.


	15. 

_**About Time**_

by April CK

* * *

**Part 15**

A streak of golden energy frantically wove through the violent crowd.

Were-monkeys were everywhere. Most of the deceased Saiyan Army had glanced up and caught sight of the false-moon attack but even the few that hadn't looked up, they'd seen the light anyway. Hell was frozen solid and the walls of ice had acted as mirrors, reflecting the light all over the place. So that part had worked. Vegeta had successfully triggered the transformation.

Take the collective power of the entire Saiyan Army - almost every Saiyan that has ever lived and every warrior now capable of at least Super Saiyan - and multiply it by ten. There aren't even numbers that high.

Vegeta had expected the sheer amount of power to destroy hell. At least the level of hell that he was currently trapped on. He had expected that the ice would melt, the walls would crumble and the Saiyan Army - as well as a few Icejins - would cease existing.

Hell had shaken but stubbornly remained intact. Which had the unfortunate side effect of keeping everyone alive. Spirits couldn't die in hell.

The Saiyans were Vegetas main concern. The Icejins, where ever they were, were probably being trampled.

He had been right about the Saiyans - most of the warriors weren't accustomed to their were-monkey forms. Under regular circumstances, the forced power up to ten times their own energy level would have killed them. These weren't regular circumstances. The Saiyans were surviving - kicking and screaming and lashing out as the overwhelming amounts of ki tortured them but surviving. And, as Vegeta knew all too well, anything that a Saiyan survived made them stronger. So far this fact had only made the torture worst. But how long would it be before the Saiyan warriors adapted?

Vegeta didn't want to think about what his odds might be against an army of enraged were-monkeys. He was having enough trouble avoiding injury as things were - constantly dodging various giant limbs as the transformed Saiyans all around him thrashed in agony. The were-monkeys were more than dangerous enough without adding the element of brain power to the mix.

He had to get out of there. That was all there was to it. Even if he only managed to escape to a different part of hell.

Vegeta was flying with his eyes half closed, trying to avoid being transformed into a were-monkey himself. He wasn't sure if he even still had that transformation since his tail had never regrown but he didn't care to find out. As a result of this, his flight was more turbulant than it would have been otherwise. He'd already had several close calls.

A pair of giant hands came out of nowhere and snapped shut with such speed that Vegeta couldn't avoid being caught between them.

* * *

For a long moment all that Android 17 could do was stare. This was partially because his robotic joints were still in poor condition but mostly because the creature in front of him was just the sort of thing that caused others to stare.

By itself, the giant pitch black turtle would have been too easy to rationalize away to be very noteworthy. It was obviously a mutation, perhaps the result of genetic experiments. Who knew. And the ki, because Android 17 could detect ki, he decided that the reading he was getting must be some kind of error. How could any animal, no matter how giant, have so much energy? What would a turtle need ki for anyway? It didn't make sense.

There was a bulky feathery thing spread across the turtles shell and it was this part of the scene that was earning most of Android 17s baffled attention. Occasionally sparks would fly and feathers would be ruffled. From 17s current angle, it almost looked as if the turtle had wings. Which made even less sense.

MEOW. Korin rarely had reason to speak in fluent cat anymore - so many of the animals had learned human languages - but he hoped to provoke a certain reaction.

It worked.

"AAAAAHHHHHHHH!" Android 17 had acquired a slight cat phobia. He was still chewed up from his encounter with the Briefs Cat. So in an effort to escape the cat behind him, Android 17 darted as best as he could towards the turtle in front of him.

Unikame percieved this as mildly threatening behavior and raised the edge of a forefin, as if preparing to swat an annoying insect. Android 17 barely collected his wits in time to dodge and Unikame, frustrated, immediately tried to swat him again.

With Survival thus preoccupied, Korin blurred across the sand. He moved with such speed that the sand he touched melted and left a trail of glass pawprints embedded into the beach behind him. The pawprints came to an end beside one of Unikames forefins. Korin had entered the giant turtles shell.

Unikame spasmed and retreated into the ocean, taking Fengs body with him.

* * *

The phoenix spirit staggered and screamed. Everyone could see it now. By aiming their attacks at the ground instead of at the phoenix, the warriors had raised enough dust to extinguish the numerous small fires and make the ghostly bird more visible. This had, of course, made Tenshinhan more visible as well but neither Raditz nor Bardock had been terribly phased to see him. With as much weird stuff as they'd been through lately - why bother even reacting to something as mundane as a human ghost with three eyes?

Bardock and Raditz exchanged puzzled glances. They didn't understand how the phoenix could be hurt. They'd all stopped attacking it since their previous attacks hadn't done any damage.

"Maybe the dust is getting to it?" Bardock shrugged.

Raditz shook his head. "If there was enough dust in the air to suffocate anything, we'd be suffocating."

_Maybe it's attached to something else..._ Tenshin reflected on his own experience as an earth-bound ghost. When he'd been attached to his corpse, he'd felt phantom pains. It wasn't quite as bad now that he was attached to Gohan. Tenshinhan almost couldn't feel any of Gohans pain - although the kid wasn't all that badly hurt. Gohan was alive and unconscious.

The creature was still screaming, filling the air with short shrill wails that rose an octave each time the bird paused to gasp. It turned away from them, trotting unsteadily and using its outstretched wings for balance. Then it began to flap...

All three of the warriors tensed. The phoenix was going to flee. They hadn't been expecting this and weren't sure how to react. Warrior, hunter and assassin - their killer instincts were telling them that now was the time to attack.

Bardock recovered from the impulse first. "Let it go." He stepped back and put conscious effort into relaxing his stance. "If there's anything out there that can hurt that monster, I don't want to meet it."

* * *

Heaven was not built of stone. There was an occasional decorative marble pillar or something but for the most part, heaven was constructed from clouds. Because clouds were stronger than stone. The average cloud was made with water and air - two of the very elements that shaped nature and all the rocks contained within.

Thus an avalanche of clouds is actually more dangerous than one of rocks. Not because of the weight but because of the pressure.

Snakes Way was instantly vaporized as the bright tattered remains of heaven smashed downward, falling through the area. For a split second the sacred path was little more than a white-grey mist and then... even as the clouds continued tumbling past... a haunting, deafening noise arose. The unique sound of heaven slamming into hell.

A gust of artic wind was abruptly followed by a wall of fire leaping upwards, blazing through the clouds. The heat was so intense that it burned the very air, evaporated the clouds. Turned the water to steam. The steam diluted the smoke from the flames and the cooling of the air caused increased humidity since there was no gravity here to make rain fall.

The Universe remained charged with nervous energy even as the dust began to settle. Heaven and hell had been erased but - by some miracle - almost everything inbetween had been left intact. The apocalypse was over, it had come and gone. Nothing lasted forever.

* * *

On Earth two important clusters of medium sized pink orbs began to fade. The prisoners of time struggled to stay in existence but their power was fading. Times were changing. Space had shifted. The Universe itself had reorganized.

Unikame snapped out of the trance he'd been locked into while possessed. Survival was dazed and had no memory of recent events. He swam to the surface of the ocean for air and sat there, confused. Unikame wondered what had become of the island that had been on his back. He didn't notice that he was bleeding right away.

Feng, who had been possessed for considerably longer, dropped from the sky in pain and did not get up. Love would have to recover her senses more slowly. The injuries to her spirit were too great to undo all at once and her physical body was once more trapped underwater.

There were no pink orbs around Gohan. The prisoners of time had been seeking power. Tenshinhan wasn't aware of it but by using up Gohans energy, he'd caused the pink orbs to completely lose interest in possessing the kid. So when the boy regained consciousness, he'd be himself again.

* * *

A sphere of orange ki encased inside a sphere of blue-white ki hung over the place where Snakes Way had once been.

Gokus response to the oncoming disaster had been to teleport in an attempt to get out of the way. He'd taken his friends to the only other ki signature he'd that been able to detect and had then fainted. Something - the cloud avalanche or perhaps the wall of fire - had brushed against him for a split second. That had been enough.

The protective orange sphere of ki mostly belonged to Yamucha though Yajirobe was also contributing. This was a breakthrough for Yajirobe, who had never summoned so much ki in all his life but the situation had definitely provided motivation. The human warriors were supporting Goku between them.

Yajirobes shaken voice broke the silence. "What... was... that?"

"Looked like an apocalypse." Someone remarked. "About time. We were overdue."

Yamucha decided to risk opening his eyes at this point. "Kaiosama?"

"Apocalypse..." The owner of the blue-white sphere of ki chuckled absently from where he hovered. "Reminds me of a joke I heard once."

"Uhm..." Yamucha glanced around, disoriented. "How did you get here? Where's your planet?"

"Huh?" The blue deity blinked. "Oh, that. Went to hell in a handbasket. And please just call me King Kai, it saves confusion. Kaiosama is a rather common title around here."

"But if your planet is gone..." Yamucha sounded heartbroken, he couldn't help but wonder if other planets were okay.

Yajirobe was thinking along similar lines and shaking his head. "There is no way." He said softly. "Korin would have told me if Earth was scheduled for demolition. I mean... Why not, you know?"

The remark was enough to cause Yamucha to straighten up. "Scheduled?"

"Everything in its own time or something like that." Yajirobe explained quickly. "Barring miracles and such. Uhm. Anyway. Er... King Kai is it? Shame about your planet..."

"Eh. Planets come and go." King Kai walked across the air. "I like my new place better anyway." He grinned. "You should come see it."

For lack of better ideas, they followed him. It became apparent as they did so that King Kai had not been where they'd expected him to be. The walk was a short one. In taking them to King Kai, Goku had very nearly teleported them into Lord Enmas office. Lord Enma was nowhere to be seen.

A massive and somewhat charred blue-green dragon was curled up on the floor.

"Miracles!" King Kai was alarmed at the sight of this unexpected visitor, "Are you injured?"

The dragon coughed and carefully uncoiled to reveal that it had been protecting a decent sized purple ki shield with a flare of orange and red mixed into it. Most of the creatures contained within the colorful shield were green.

LETS TRADE. A second giant creature hung over the office now and the Nameks below cheered at the sight of it. Porunga, the dragon of Planet Namek, grinned and opened his palms to reveal a somewhat squished Saiyan Prince.

Miracles nodded. Porunga put Vegeta down, scooped up the Nameks, flicked a creature out of the batch and departed. Once this had been done Miracles coughed a few times, hovered, grinned down at the spirits and then also left. The dragons had a lot of work to do in the rearranged universe. So did the immortal engineers. And there were plenty of survivors to work with.

"That's it." Krillen dizzly pulled himself off a wall of Lord Enmas office. "I officially do not like dragons anymore."

"... this has been one weird day." Yajirobe muttered and nobody, not even King Kai, argued the point.

* * *

The noise of an explosion shook Capsule Corp and, being the sorts of people they were, Bulma and Dr. Briefs did not run away from the noise. Instead they ran outside to see what had caused such a racket. They blinked in the sunlight - hadn't it been night a moment ago? - and found themselves confronted by a very small black cat that was sitting directly in front of the crater where the gravity chamber had once been.

Bulma tried not to show how disappointed she was. She'd half expected to see a certain someone else there. Even with the news of his death, the reality of Vegetas absence was not sinking in quite yet. It probably wouldn't for a while. Bulma couldn't accept what she hadn't witnessed.

Which was also why her brain calmly refused to accept the idea that a very small black cat had just destroyed the gravity chamber.

"Computer must have blown a fuse." Bulma mumbled as she went back inside.

Dr. Briefs stood by the crater a while longer. "But... I didn't leave the computer on..."

The tiny cat at his feet hacked up some recognizable parts of the former gravity room then bounded indoors.

* * *

"KRILLEN! VEGETA!"

"ack!"

"Kakarott, if you do not release me this instant then I will make a pretzel from your spine."

"Jeez. Nice to see you again too." Goku had recovered as much as was currently possible. His wings had been ripped to shreds which hurt but Goku didn't miss them - he didn't need them. As he released the latest victims of his bearhug technique, he glanced at his human friends. "Why were you guys trying to save him?"

Vegeta arced an eyebrow at this. He'd died without being aware that anyone was trying to save him. And he was mildly surprised to think that the humans had enough courage to battle anything that had killed him.

"Uhm. We think he was kinda trying to save the Earth from the androids or something." Yamucha ventured, sounding skeptical. "Must have been having an off day."

"Yea." Krillen added dryly. "And you know how we get about saving the Earth."

Goku grinned at the Prince. "YOU were trying to save Earth?"

Too tired to think of a better excuse, Vegeta scowled and muttered. "It was an accident. It won't happen again." Then he focused on the human warriors as if expecting to be blamed for their deaths. "Hmf. Stupid." Before anyone could give him a 'be nice' lecture, Vegeta continued. "It was my fight. You should have stayed out of it." A short pause to let those words sink in and then. "Did at least the green idiot survive?"

What he was really asking was whether or not the dragonballs could be used anymore.

The warrior spirits were clustered together in one area of Lord Enmas office. King Kai and his pets wandered past occasionally, carrying assorted boxes. The god was unpacking.

"Piccolo's dead." Yamucha had arrived late enough in the battle to sense that. "So Kami is dead too." He stared at the space that had so recently been occupied by Porunga. "And it looked like most the other Nameks were dead as well."

"Planet Namek was exploded again." Krillen confirmed with a nod. "But I think they've worked out a way back..."

Yajirobe finally spoke. "If Piccolo and Kami are dead, why aren't they here? And are we missing anyone else?"

"We're missing Tenshinhan." Yamucha had sensed that death as well. "I don't know if Chaozu was there, I didn't sense his ki. And I don't know if both Gohans are dead but we are missing at least one of them."

This last remark earned Yamucha a few confused sideways glances.

"Well maybe if we wait, they'll find us." Yajirobe suggested quietly. "We've got to be easier to detect as a group."

Goku had started to figure out the 'both Gohans' comment but didn't trust himself to say as much. What could you say about someone that you'd killed by accident? It was a very touchy subject. Goku had never really forgiven himself for causing his adoptive grandfathers demise.

"Kakarotts brat is dead?" Vegeta was shaken by this possibility, although for completey different reasons than anyone else. "... Trunks..."

The unspoken thought finished itself. If Gohan was dead then Trunks may well be the only Saiyan left alive anywhere. And even if both the brats were alive, neither of them were purebred. Vegeta didn't regret that the annihilation of hell had disposed of his peers and ancestors since they'd been dead anyway and he'd never cared for any of them. But, at the same time, unavoidable as it was - Vegeta really did not like the idea of two demi-saiyan kids being all that was left of the species. He hoped the pressure didn't make them do anything stupid.

"Hey..." Krillen coughed and nudged Goku. "You'll never believe what I saw."

Goku sounded distant but came out of his private thoughts enough to reply. "What?"

"I was exploded. So were the Nameks. Guess which level of heaven that put us on." When nobody guessed, Krillen smiled and told them. "The same level that you and Vegeta would have gone to if you'd been killed thirty years ago. Those Nameks that just left with Porunga are now the proud adoptive parents of all the kids that died when the Saiyan world exploded."

"Nameks?" Yamucha chuckled at the mental image. "Peaceful Nameks raising purebred Saiyans?"

"That's what Dende said." Krillen grinned. "Hey - if Earth can survive it, who knows. At least their world won't have a moon."

* * *

At Lunar University...

"You are such an idiot sometimes." Uranai Baba relaxed as she brought a pair of reincarnation spells to an end and focused on the shabby group that had materialized in front of her, shaking her head. "First you killed Love..."

"That was nineteen years ago and an accident!" Roshi protested.

"Food poisoning by accident eh?" His sister chuckled. "Well if anyone could pull that off, I suppose it would be you. Though I must admit brother, I've always been under the impression that you were upset with Love since every women with a functional brain has avoided your advances."

"Baba," Roshi grumbled, flushed with mixed embarrassment and anger. "save the lecture. With our luck, we'll probably have at least another three hundred years to debate the issue."

"Possibly." Uranai Baba conceded as she began to rapidly remove the voodoo needles from Oolong. "Good thing, too. It'll take me that long just to talk some sense into you. Honestly. What benefit would have come from fighting Time? Brother, we are mortals. We can't win such battles. Time will get us eventually."

"This from someone who's over five hundred years old." Roshi whispered towards Puar.

"I heard that!" With a mock-frown the witch held her head high. "And I'm older than that. Show some respect! Get it right!"

"Are we gonna be okay?" Puar drifted towards the ground sleepily. Losing seven lives had taken a lot out of her. She was exhausted and her brain was in too much shock to react to anything else.

Roshi caught the blue-grey cat before she fell asleep hovering. "You'll be fine. Just get some rest." He said seriously. The shapeshifters had always been good friends to him. Animals had never judged him quite as much as humans tended to. This was why there was a note of somber concern in the old masters voice. Puar was a tough little cat, there was no question in Master Roshis mind that she'd pull through. But Oolong...

"We will all be fine." Uranai Baba said firmly as she took a vial of potion from one of the shelves in the room and shook the contents. "For a while, anyway."

* * *

The doorbell rang and ChiChi went to answer it. Mrs. Briefs remained in the kitchen where she was happily reading a dictionary to Trunks.

ChiChi opened the door and looked up and saw her father, who was looking down.

"Does he usually sleep on the doorstep?" Ox King wondered.

ChiChi sighed at the sight of her son. Gohan coming home slightly beaten up was as common as craters in the front yard so ChiChi wasn't over reacting to either. "He has been lately. Hopefully it's just a phase." She knelt by her son and shook his shoulder, trying to wake him. Once he was awake, that was when she'd nag at him a bit - it was a mom thing. She only did it because she cared. "C'mon kid..."

Gohan stirred but didn't wake up.

"Dinner time?" suggested Ox King.

"Nah. That worked on his father." ChiChi leaned close to her sons ear. "Hey! You! Math quiz! Now! No calculators!"

"...whahuh?" Gohan flinched, half opened his eyes and blearily regarded the world. "ugh... I didn't study..."

There were a total of four ghosts watching this scene unfold. Bardock and Raditz had returned to being dead as soon as the reincarnation spells affecting them had worn off.

"Thanks. But I'm not sure if I'm supposed to leave." Tenshinhan was telling them. "Or even if I can." He didn't add that the idea of going back to heaven held very little appeal to him. Last time he'd been there, it had been creepy. He didn't know that heaven and hell currently existed only in memory.

"With all due respect," Bardock insisted in a tone that he'd used often while alive, back when he'd been the commander of a small battalion. "I think that my grandson can watch out for himself. He'll be stronger as soon as he's recovered. Besides, from the sounds of things, Kami owes you some answers as well. You should come with us."

What the Saiyans were very politely implying was that Tenshinhan - because he was capable of using Gohans ki - could potentially become a bigger threat to Gohan than anything else. So they weren't going to let Tenshin stay. Tenshinhan was having some trouble convincing them that it might not be possible for him to leave.

The fourth ghost, the most recent to join the group, was an elderly fellow with a set of wings and the kame mark on his robe. Nobody, including the angel himself, was quite sure how he'd arrived at the Son House. He just had.

Gohan Senior - and now, he was aware of this - spoke without taking his eyes off his namesake. "I have always wondered... Why?" He nodded in Bardocks direction. "The greatest joys in my life have come at your expense. Why did you part from them? What could cause someone to send their own child into space?"

"Good question." Raditz folded his arms and looked at his father expectantly. He spoke with a carefully neutral tone. "I've wondered something similar."

Bardock rolled his eyes as if this was a question that he'd expected for a long time and perhaps, one that he'd asked himself. "Ah, well - you know. Our planet was about to be destroyed and I was psychic back then..."

"Wait..." Tenshinhan felt this was a significant point. "You're psychic?"

"Used to be. Before I died. Good riddence though." Bardock grumbled. "Visions are a pain."

Tenshin couldn't keep from grinning a little. "A very good friend of mine used to say the exact same thing." That seemed to decide the issue. "Look, if I can leave with you then I will. All right?"

"Goku - you are a friend of his, aren't you?" Gohan Senior inquired.

"Uhm. Yes. Kind of. I mean... Well, yes." Tenshin stammered. "I didn't know him very well but we've saved each other a few times."

"Then you'll come with us." Gohan Senior nodded. "We old warriors are in need of someone to reintroduce us to our son. I imagine that he has grown a bit since we last saw him..."

* * *

Civilization was, much to his own surprise, not going to die. The healing spells from the temple on Earth were being far more effective now that the sword was removed from his spirit. He had recovered almost completely. Could times have changed already? Chaozu had to doubt it. Time took time.

The sword posed another puzzle. His every instinct told him that the weapon had belonged to a mortal once but the blade was now so heavily coated with his own energy that all evidence of mortal ki had been erased.

What was he supposed to do? He had at his disposal a sword, a time machine and a flying carpet. He couldn't just leave them here. He felt a deeply ingrained obligation to do something.

It would be odd but... Maybe the journey was not one that a mortal could survive. Not yet. Not even with a working time machine. Lightspeed was very fast after all. But perhaps... an immortal could... No, no. That would be too weird. Although...

The time machine was already programmed. According to the readouts on the console, the original pilot - whomever that had been - had been trying to reach the date May 13th, 767 A.D. That date was familiar. That date was... Yesterday? Someone from sixteen years in the future, someone who knew of Capsule Corp, had been trying to reach yesterday? Of all the dates they could have traveled to... How strange.

Someone from sixteen years in the future had come with the sword. A warrior then, more than likely. Someone who had either intended to look for trouble or cause it. Someone...

The Unicorn paused to bend over the time machine and squint at its surface. A single word had been carved into the side: _hope_.

Hope... A mortal warrior from sixteen years into the Earths own future had been trying to undo the past. Was the future truly so awful that someone would risk themselves for such a journey? Had Time changed for the worse?

The only way to find out for sure what the pilots intentions had been was to ask the pilot. And the only way to ask the pilot was to get in the time machine and go to the future. Yes, that was sensible thing to do. Civilization was already changing shape, resuming his smaller and more humanoid form. He would go to the future and visit the pilot. If he chose to warn the pilot then he would have the sword and the time machine as evidence of his claim.

_You should come along, in case this machine needs any repairs en route._ Chaozu thought at the flying carpet while he reset the dates. Sixteen years in the future - that would be 783 A.D. With luck, they would arrive before the time machine and its original mortal pilot left.

The flying carpet hesitated before rolling itself up and plunking down beside him. The rocket engines of the time machine gradually whirred to life as the dome-top of the modified submarine slid closed. A hiss of air, a roar of fire then nothing remained in the former Room of Spirit and Time. Nothing but the faint and distant ticking that was the pulse of The Universe.

* * *

A row of colorful beach houses sat at the edge of the beach, looking perfectly normal. As if they'd been there for more than five minutes.

They hadn't.

Light flashed in the windows, a door flew open and the building literally spat someone out. Someone wearing a swimsuit. Android 18 yelped and darted back inside. After a series of crashing noises and more lights, she re-emerged wearing her old and slightly charred denim outfit.

If looks could kill, Android 18s scowl would have caused life on Earth to go extinct in a heartbeat. She definitely did not look like someone you would dare to ask questions of. Especially not questions like 'what the hell happened to you?'

"What the hell happened to you?" asked Android 17, who had detached one of his own arms and was trying to shake all the sand out of it.

Android 18 did not feel like explaining that she'd been beaten up by Gohan earlier. She also did not care to explain that she'd tried on an outfit that had proceeded to cling to her and change shape. But she had obviously been traumatized. So instead of calmly saying 'I thought you were dead and I didn't particularly care', which would have been more normal for her, Android 18 seized her brother by his collar and said:

"Swimsuits. Are. Evil." A flicker of madness passed through her glassy blue eyes and she swayed where she stood. "We. Must. Destroy. All. Swimsuits."


	16. Epilogues

_**About Time**_

by DoraMouse

* * *

**Part 16: Epilogues**

**780 A.D.**

The landscape was dotted with heaps of rubble and scattered plumes of smoke were rising into an already darkened sky. The harsh crackles of ever-burning fires intermingled with an assortment of haunting creaks that eminated from torn buildings as their damaged structures succumbed to the elements and crumbled further.

Softly, with a barely audible patter, the rain began. It fell in a nearly silent glistening curtain of water that only gained color once it had impacted the ground. The scattered puddles on the remains of an asphalt road were mostly black and grey reflections of the sky but here and there, a puddle was red. Fading to pink as the rain steadily diluted the blood and washed it away.

Corpses left in the open were not an uncommon sight on this world anymore. The sidewalks and ruined buildings of the Earths cities were virtually littered with bodies in various stages of decay. It was often impossible to tell from the physical remains whether the creatures had been human once. But this crumpled form, alone in the road, had quite clearly belonged to a young man. His death had come recently for although he was no longer breathing, his injuries still bled. A faint orange blur hovered beside the scene.

_Damn._ Gohan, age 23, berated himself. Though not overly surprised by his current condition, he didn't feel ready to be dead. There was too much left to do. He replayed his last battle in his mind and picked it apart. If he had been a little faster, if he had used a different approach...

The arm. It was definitely his left arm - or rather, the lack of his left arm - that had doomed his recent battle from the start. Gohan had always launched his ki attacks through his hands so to have one hand missing had greatly impaired his fighting style. And he'd only had this problem for the past year so he'd not yet gotten fully accustomed to fighting without the limb.

Being a ghost, Gohan was now intact. He scowled at his left arm and wished that he'd had it earlier.

REGRETS WILL ONLY HOLD YOU BACK.

The figure of a smiling white cat stood in the rain without getting wet. Gohan was startled to know that he wasn't alone, even moreso when he finally recognized the cat. He'd seen Korin on and off all his life - Gohan had always been perceptive enough to catch glimpses of the cat each time that he'd seen someone die. But he'd never mentioned this. He'd often been too overwhelmed by everything else that was going on to give any thought to such details as the cats consistant presence.

Now though, it was starting to make sense to him. "You can see me." A statement, not a question and Gohan didn't like what was implied by its truth. He spoke in a tone of increasing urgency. "Look, I'm sorry but I can't leave..."

Korin chuckled and indicated the corpse. YOU HAVE ALREADY LEFT.

"Only physically!" Gohan protested, trying not to think of how strange that sounded. A flood of thoughts rushed through him. His mother was still alive and his Grandfather Ox as well, they would need comfort and protection. Trunks, now barely age 14, had only been training for the past year - he would still need guidance. The evil androids were still out there and so the people of the world needed him. That was all there was to it. In the past thirteen years Gohan had become so accustomed to such burdens that he couldn't quite conceive of existing without them.

"I may not be able to do much," Gohan admitted, "but I have to at least try."

Still smiling, Korin shook his head. YOU HAVE DONE WHAT YOU COULD. IT IS TIME TO MOVE ON.

"But..." Gohan faced the direction where his home was and fumbled for the words. "Will they be okay?"

THAT IS UP TO THEM. Korin turned and padded away, limping. COME. THERE ARE MANY SPIRITS WAITING TO SEE YOU.

This remark was a metaphoric shot in the arm. Gohan had spent most of his life trying not to think about all the dead people he knew. He had gotten so caught up in the affairs of Earth that he had started to forget there was anything beyond his own devestated world. But... The afterlife... And all the friends and relatives that he would be reunited with there... The weight in Gohans soul lifted as these realizations came. He couldn't keep from smiling now. Gohan was 23 and hadn't felt this happy since age 8, back when his father had still been alive and healthy.

Happiness was fleeting. The past thirteen years had taken their toll. Gohan remained outwardly calm and subdued as he followed Korin, refusing to celebrate until there was more reason to. Guilt and anxiety clouded his thoughts. What if his deceased friends were upset with him? Obviously, he hadn't managed to save them...

He wasn't sure where the question came from but suddenly Gohan asked. "Why are you called Korin anyway?"

The cat grinned broadly. WHAT SORT OF PERSON INVESTIGATES DEATH?

After a moment of confused thought, Gohan shrugged. "I was just asking." Then he realized that Korins question had been a riddle and the answer came to him. "Oh. A coroner. Eheh. Good word pun."

Gohan looked up and saw that Korin was gone. Earth was also gone. He was inside a large mostly-empty office with an intimidating wooden desk that he had to stand on his tiptoes to see the top of. "Err..."

"What's a good word pun?" Said the blue deity that was now standing beside Gohan. It was humanoid blue blob that had pointy ears, several short whiskers and a pair of thin antenna. It wore dark robes and dark sunglasses. It smiled. "I love word puns!

"Uh..." Gohan gathered his wits, "Excuse me, I'm a bit confused. Is this judgement?"

"Used to be, few years ago." King Kai nodded. "We got rid of judgement though. Too much paperwork."

"... so... how does someone get to heaven?"

"Can't. We got rid of heaven too. And hell." said King Kai. "Good riddence, I say. Damned oppressive places - both of 'em. It's like I've been telling Dai Kaio for millenia - life is plenty hard enough on its own, no need to have the afterlife political as well. Isn't that right Bubbles?"

From somewhere above, there was an affirmative squeal. A small brown monkey scampered across the surface of what had once been Lord Enmas desk.

"One of these days," Gohan sighed, "something normal is gonna happen to me."

King Kai erupted into a fit of laughter. "Oh, that's a good one!" He giggled. "You mortals are priceless!" After taking a few moments to recover his composure, the blue god straightened up and beamed. "Well kid, you've made me laugh so now I can show you the way in. Welcome to the afterlife!"

He opened a door and something orange instantly blurred through it. The orange blur was followed a few moments later by several other streaks of energy that slowed down and took more definite forms as they entered the office.

"Hey Goku," Krillen teased, "leave something of 'em in existence for the rest of us to hug would ya?"

* * *

**783 A.D.**

Sleep was a rare luxury and Trunks - age 17 - couldn't afford it. He knew that he shouldn't be up already, not with his injuries, but he was too nervous.

What Trunks was nervous about was the time machine. Gohan had been meant to pilot it. People in the past would have recognized Gohan, they would have trusted him. But Gohan had been killed three years ago and Trunks was left to take his senseis place. It had to be a warrior that went, just in case.

The time machine was almost done now and Trunks had reluctantly accepted the mission to pilot it. He would make the journey to the past, he would warn the people that he'd outlived. The warriors in the past wouldn't recognize him and they might not trust him but Trunks knew that he had to find a way to make them believe his warnings. He was prepared to join their battles, to fight alongside them and earn their respect. He had to initiate the change. Because he couldn't keep living like this - nobody could.

Less than a week ago, he'd battled the androids. Again. He'd put everything he had into that fight. But all his energy, all his anger, four years of intense training and Super Saiyan - it hadn't been enough. Trunks had almost been killed. No, it had been more than that. By all rights, he should have been killed. He could remember losing consciousness towards the end of the battle. There had been a flash of dazzling white light...

And yet he'd woken up at home, safe and sound. Apparently his mother had found him on the doorstep. Trunks hadn't been able to make sense of this turn of events but he sincerely doubted that the androids had decided to spare him. So he mentally thanked whatever gods had kept him alive.

Trunks, of course, had no way of knowing that the god responsible was nearby and that his thought made Civilization pause and smile. He also had no way of knowing that the time machine had been reprogrammed slightly by a flying carpet.

He had only recently found out that his mother and grandparents had agreed that it made more sense to send him to the year 764 A.D. So instead of fighting the androids in 767 A.D., his visit would just give the other warriors more time to prepare. His family was protective of him in that way. They weren't going to send Trunks into a battle because they wanted him to come back.

Trunks paced his room and wondered if he would remember the journey at all. Would the past change the future - his future - so much that he forgot about the time machine? Would the time machine cease existing? Would he end up being a completely different person in the new future or would he come back and meet a version of himself that had never needed to travel time? How could he change the timeline without also being changed by it? What if he made things worse?

These were the main concerns Trunks had. And it was kind of scary because nobody could give him straight answers. This was Capsule Corps first time machine. He would be the test pilot. The only way to find out what would happen was to go ahead and do it. There were just so many things that could go wrong.

_Story of my life._ Trunks thought, _Maybe it wouldn't hurt to forget..._

* * *

**Later in 783 A.D.**

Two figures stood on the astral plane. Their gleaming physical bodies lay at their feet. Each had a hole punched clean through the midsection - yet their bodies did not bleed.

"Sister..." Android 17 began, in a tone of utter confusion that he had very rarely used while alive. "What has happened to us?"

Android 18 shared his uneasiness. "I don't know."

The situation didn't compute. Robots couldn't die. Robots were just turned off, deactivated. Death was something that happened to non-robots. And this felt too much like life to be death anyway. Death - or deactivation - was final. That was the extent of the androids knowledge on the subject. No one had ever told them about an afterlife. The word 'ghost' was not part of their vocabulary.

"Perhaps this odd vision is the result of internal errors." Android 18 reasoned, referring to the fact that all of the androids computer chips and mechanical parts were at least sixteen years old now and well worn from use. "Perhaps we are in need of an upgrade."

"I bet it's that brats fault." Android 17 agreed with his sisters logic. "He must have managed to knock something loose. We'll have to punish him."

Their last clear memories were of an enraged demi-saiyan with hair that had been purple before it had turned gold. But neither android could believe that the brat posed any real danger to them because he'd never posed a threat before. No Super Saiyan had ever posed a threat to them before. And as far as the androids knew, there wasn't anything beyond Super Saiyan. They had been programmed to believe that the only thing on Earth stronger than a Super Saiyan was an android.

"If we take him hostage," Android 18 was thinking aloud, "his family may be capable of providing us with an upgrade. We would, of course, supervise."

A sadistic smirk crept into Android 17s features. If there was anything better than outright killing the worthless humans, it was exploiting them. "Of course."

AH, MY ASSISTANTS. Korin smiled wistfully. I HAVE RECOVERED FULLY. YOUR SERVICES ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED.

The cats appearance caused both androids to jump, startled. They had no idea who Korin was or what he was doing there. However his presence was causing them to doubt their theory that this was just a strange vision caused by repairable internal errors.

"CAT!" Android 17 had retained his feline phobia over the years and quickly hid behind his sister.

"Assistants?" Android 18 stammered, her confidence shaken. "Our... SERVICES?"

"Ironic, isn't it?" Said a young woman who was see-through but who otherwise looked like a human punk, complete with tattoos and multiple piercings. She stared at Android 18 with an intensely disapproving air then stepped past the baffled androids. "You think you're in control and then this happens."

Korin had brought a pair of earth-bound ghosts with him. He smiled and watched.

"Fascinating." The second ghost seemed rather more normal. He was a lanky young man - also see-through - in casual street clothes who peered at the androids curiously. "No resemblence whatsoever."

Android 18 had zero tolerance for humans who peered at her. She grabbed the human by his throat and growled more than spoke. "What are you babbling on about?"

The young man glanced to the female punk then back at Android 18. "Maybe _some_ resemblence." He amended.

"Welcome to death row." The lady punk snorted. "If you're lucky, you just die and go to the afterlife. If you're not then some idiotic mad scientists dig up your corpse and turn it into a glorified barbie doll."

Stunned silence. The androids didn't like what they were figuring out. It didn't compute, this couldn't be happening - but it was.

I CAN TELL THAT YOU FOUR ARE GOING TO NEED SOME TIME TO TALK. Korin laughed. I'LL COME BACK LATER.


	17. Just so you know

_About Time_

by April CK

* * *

Authors Notes

Just so YOU know that _I_ know what I'm doing.

If you think this story is weird, you haven't studied enough mythology. I've drawn from Chinese myths a lot. I figured it was appropriate since the official Dragonball series is based off a Chinese myth. (Journey to the West)

The dual formulas I used for time travel are e=mc2 and d=hr(mph). These are actual basic formulas - physics and algebra, respectively. Why does everyone overlook the d=(mph)hr one anyway? What exactly is it that makes people think they can accelerate to 200,000 miles per second without going anywhere?

Ancient China, India and Japan are responsible for associating White Tigers with death. White Tigers were also associated many other things including metal, protecting gravesites, autumn and the direction West. Korin fit the role too well for me to ignore it. Plus, like I had him say, why should Death be human? Cats have to die nine times.

Black cats have an interesting symbolic history. A long time ago the Norse culture had a goddess named Freya who would sometimes come to Earth to spy on mortals in the form of a black cat. And the sacred Norse _Freyas-day_ has, in modern times, become known simply as _Friday_. Eventually a new religion called Christianity came along and the Christians went around insulting/killing/etc members of older religions in order to gain converts. Historically speaking, this seems to be a fairly standard procedure for new religions. Anyway. Christianity is what associated Freya - and most other non-christian gods and symbols that they didn't feel like adopting - with bad luck. So things like black cats and Friday the 13th suddenly became bad luck and also, people who practiced the old religions became known as pagans. This seems to be when the black cats first became associated with 'witches' and occult practices. Since then the stereotype of witches with black cats has become popular and...well...Uranai Baba, the Briefs Cat - it just clicked for me. *shrugs*

_Feng_ is a Chinese word for _wind_ and, apparently, is also an extremely informal abbreviation for _phoenix_.

Chaozu is right. There are different kinds of psychic. The four main categories are:

_Clairvoyance_: genius-level intuition. Able to understand things that haven't been explained _without_ seeing the future or reading minds. _Precognition_: seeing the future or the past. Varies in scope. For example if you just suddenly know, for no apparent reason and without being told, what song will be played on the radio next - technically that is a form of predicting the future. _Telepathy_: mind reading. Tends to include the psychic extension of a persons sense of hearing. _Pyschometry_: reading the auras/thoughts/emotions left on objects. Basically the psychic extensions of the taste, smell, sight and touch/feel senses.

Take note that _Telekinesis_, which involves moving things without touching them, is not always counted as a true psychic skill since it typically involves body energy fields (auras) more than mental talents.

_Tempus_ is the Latin word for _Time_.

The idea of semi-sentient schools with interesting but accurate names is borrowed from a few places. So my thanks to Terry Pratchetts Discworld novel series, all hail Unseen University! Thanks also to The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, all hail Wossamatta U! (pronounced: 'What's ah matter, you?') One last thanks goes out to the author Lewis Sachar, all hail Wayside School! ('wayside' is a variation on 'sideways'.)

In case anyone cares, parabola and hyperbola are in fact both math terms. According to my old geometry notes - and my dictionary - these terms refer to specific formulas that calculate distances between certain points on a given type of graph.

For anyone that doesn't know, _Tenshi_ is japanese for _angel_. And Ten-shin-han translates to heaven-core-stamp. So a certain character becoming a guardian angel is not completely a coincidence. Granted, the name has always kinda suited his persona but I just felt like taking things more literally when I wrote this story.

One of the (many...) bizarre aspects of myths in general is that death is very rarely the end of the story. I've read rather a lot of myths and legends where at least one of the main characters was dead and yet it honestly didn't seem to limit them very much. I guess I like the concept that even when you're dead - life goes on. The irony appeals to me.

I put a LOT of thought into the whole Eternal Dragon fusion idea so I've got a right to say that I'm proud of it. The Namekian dragon-clan reference is straight out of DBZ. When told about Kami, Guru mentions that Kami must have been 'the prodigy of the dragon clan' that was sent away from planet Namek during violent storms long ago. (And Guru would know since he is probably dragon-clan himself. Thus we have dragon-clan Nameks creating dragonballs. Makes sense eh?)

If you ever get the urge to look up Ancient Chinese creation-related myths then keep an eye out for the goddess Nu Wa. There is a story about a major flood on Earth. Apparently the flood caused the mountains that held the sky up to crumble and so the sky fell. This incident wiped out the majority of mortal life on Earth. So the goddess Nu Wa came along and recreated mortals, humans specifically. It will also mention in most versions of this story that Nu Wa whacked the legs off of a really huge tortise and placed one leg at each of the four corners of the world in order to prop the sky back up. The giant black tortise becomes a guardian of the North and sometimes becomes a turtle by growing in flippers where its legs had been. Nu Wa also appoints three other animals - White Tiger, Red Phoenix and Blue/Green Dragon - to guard the Earth, she associated each animal with a direction and an element.

Despite their apparent importance to Chinese culture, about the only other place in Chinese mythology that you will even find these four sacred animals mentioned is in the study of Feng-Shui.

There is a fifth animal but it came later. The Ancient Chinese noticed that they had four guardians, one for each corner of the world, but no animal to represent them. So they came up with the fifth animal to represent China and they associated it with the direction Center. By most accounts the fifth animal is a Unicorn but in other accounts it is a Golden Dragon. It seems most likely that fifth animal was originally a Golden Dragon since the concept of the Unicorn was probably borrowed from other cultures.

Several ancient cultures seem to have been somewhat aware of things like continental drift and Earth orbit but since the people back then didn't fully understand why and how landmasses changed position, etc - they tried to explain such events with myths. Giant turtles are semi-common in oriental mythology. They are often mentioned as carrying continents and/or islands on their backs. In Hindu mythology the entire planet Earth is supported on the back of single giant turtle. _Kame_ is the japanese word for _turtle_. Thus to me, it seemed like Kame Island from Dragonball was a reference to the giant turtle myths. Yet giant turtles are not completely fictional. Some of the larger prehistoric turtles have been described as 'car-sized'.

Ancient Chinese phoenixs were not merely large birds on fire - that popular/semi-modern image is from Rome and Arabia. As described in this story the phoenixes of Ancient China were, according to books, more of a crane/dragon hybrid with hoofs instead of talons. However this was hard for people to draw so the phoenix in Chinese art was often simplified to be a giant ordamental pheasant with colorful plumage. Unicorns and dragons are often the same way, they've usually been simplified for the sake of art.

The first Unicorn is believed to have been the result of someone who had never before seen a rhinocerous trying to describe the animal in a letter. The letter-writer knew that his friends at home hadn't ever seen a rhinocerous either so he compared it to a horse, mentioned the horn on its head and viola - a myth is born. In some early artwork the Unicorn is depicted as being a bulky grey horse with the elephant-style feet and tail. At first the creature was known as Uni-horn which means 'one horn'. Historically nobody seems quite sure of when, how or why the creatures name was changed to Unicorn. (someone probably just misheard 'Uni-horn'...)

Most Chinese dragons are associated with the element of water because in China the dragons were often viewed as river/lake/ocean gods. This is why Chinese dragons generally do not exhale fire. Since they exhale clouds (golden clouds, kinda like Nimbus/Kintoun), Chinese dragons are sometimes also associated with the element of air.

The realms and elements given to Korin, Unikame, Feng, Miracles and Chaozu are mythologically accurate. In Ancient China, White Tigers were associated with Death and metal. Giant Turtles were associated with endurance, survival and water/ice. Phoenixs were associated with love, pride, change and fire. Chinese Dragons were/are still considered benevolent and eccentric, they are associated with water and sometimes air. Unicorns were associated with innocence yet also - because of all that the domestic horse has done for mankind - with industry, civilization and the earth element.

For the record, I have no idea what Uranai Babas official age is. It's never mentioned. All we're told - via the official timeline - is that she's at least 180 years older than Master Roshi. Which means that the first time she meets Goku(age 13), Uranai Baba is at least 500. This makes her the oldest living human character in the entire cast. The only characters mentioned that are officially older than her are Korin, non-Earth gods and Buu - possibly also Mister Popo, Guru and the dragon Porunga.

You'll notice that in this story I've destroyed both Kamis Lookout and the gravity chamber. Mental/emotional issues aside, I feel that the absence of these two locations might help explain why Mirai Gohan apparently never reaches SSJ2.

About the androids... I am actually trying to stick with the official timelines for this story but lets give the characters some credit huh? Apparently the androids wiped out most of Earths defending warriors in a day. So if they'd really wanted to destroy the human population of Earth, it would take them what - maybe a couple months? Not more than 16 years anyway. Yet in the official mirai story, the androids have failed to purge the Earth of human life. No reasons for this are given. Which is why I've put my own spin on the situation in this story. Yea - it's weird. But isn't it amazing how weird stuff can make sense sometimes?


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